


Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think

by anonlytree



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Gen, Liverpool, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-07
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-11-24 02:56:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 29,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/629553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonlytree/pseuds/anonlytree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 2017. Stevie got his manager's license. Xabi got fat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of this is true. The obvious parts are not.

_July 2017_  
  
Stevie spots him in the stands at half time, or rather refuses to acknowledge his presence in the stands at halftime, telling himself that the New York heat and the fucking endless woodwork shot parade of the last twenty minutes or so have finally done his head in.  
   
An hour later, once the boys put him down and the euphoria subsides into practiced post-match routine and spewing platitudes to journalists, Stevie thinks he hears:  
  
"You finally taught those lads to string more than two passes together.”  
  
He stares for a good half a minute, trying in vain to blink Xabi away.  
   
"What...," he says, swallowing sand.  
  
He leaves it at that when all Xabi has to give is a tentative smile and a little shrug of _What were you expecting_. If Stevie were to be honest with himself, he'd say _I was hoping you'd come_. As it is...  
  
"Look at you going all native."  
  
"You mean fat?"  
  
"I mean New Yorker."  
  
Stevie runs his teeth over his bottom lip lest the words _You're chunky as hell, mate, but it looks great on you_ escape. *Of course* he'd make love handles look good.  
  
Xabi tips his Yankees cap at him and takes one more hesitant step further, stops himself from even wanting to adjust Stevie’s askew tie. He’d been distracted by it the whole game, watching him pace the sideline with his hands planted on his hips and a frown of cool concentration that is only now beginning to unfurl from his brow.  
  
“Good game today. Ballsy, as the natives say.”  
  
“Wouldn’t have hurt to wrap it up in 90 minutes before we have to play Barcelona in the final in this fucking oven. But it wouldn’t be Liverpool if we did it the easy way.”  
  
“Yes, well. You’re pretty much fucked anyway.”  
  
“I hope you put that in your write-up,” Stevie snorts half-heartedly.  
  
“I don’t cover football,” Xabi says and Stevie feels ridiculously pleased to learn that.  
  
“Got tickets for Sunday?”  
  
Stevie agrees to be repaid after the final of the Bocanegra Invitational in pastrami on rye at Sandro’s, which Xabi insists is Brooklyn’s finest deli joint.  
  
~  
  
Stevie’s Dad has a heartattack on Sunday morning and nobody really cares about the 3-1 bollocking Liverpool’s U21s give Barcelona’s youth under the searing New York sun. His crisp managerial suit still reeks of dried-up champagne when he boards the red-eye from La Guardia.  
  
Xabi calls him from London two days later and they have their beef sandwich on the steps of Albert Dock the day after the funeral, chewing in silence and watching the grey ripples of the Mersey gleam in the sunshine.  
  
“I was in Bangkok.”  
  
Stevie turns to look at him and it’s the first time in five days that the sound of another human being’s voice reaches him in crisp, unmuffled soundwaves.  
  
“When you retired,” Xabi finishes and licks the grease smeared on his thumb.  
  
He’d stood in front of the newspaper kiosk for ten minutes, ten months, a decade, squinting at the splashes of red across the front page of whichever local sports newspaper dedicated an entire supplement to Captain Fantastic’s final bow. He’d gotten drunker than he already was that night, drunker than he’d been in a year, telling himself it was the logical sequel to the many nights of his Hotel Bar Blue period.  
  
“I remember the first thing I saw when I opened my laptop was a picture of your Dad kissing your head when you were running to his corner for the last time. He looked like…”  
  
Xabi hates it when he runs out of words. He juggles comfortably between two different languages, occasionally three or four when he’s reading; the tools of his new trade have become ever sharper with increased use, but every now and then his precious words dry up when he most needs them.  
  
Stevie nods tiredly, but his faint smile is genuine.  
  
“If it weren’t for him, I’d have ended up in jail, me.”  
  
“Or worse, a blueshite.”  
  
Stevie is a bit shocked at how much he still enjoys listening to Xabi’s attempts at Scouse, which inevitably end up sounding like a tipsy version of Sean Connery.  
  
“Thank you,” he says quietly. “For that… For coming…” Xabi leans into his shoulder for a long moment, a ghost of a familiar touch.  
  
“I’m thinking of moving to London. For a while.”  
  
He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything and eventually Xabi supplies what little context he’s managed to carve up in his own mind.  
  
“I want to be closer to Jon. He’s starting school in Paris in September, his mother’s husband moved them all there to run a bank or something,” he says hastily, eager to close out that sentence but not knowing quite how to. “He has been to New York a few times, but I don’t think jetlag is something to get excited about on vacation…”  
  
Stevie knows somehow that’s not the whole story. For no particular reason he’d heard enough over the years, from Pepe and occasionally from cryptic media allusions, to know better.  
  
“Should get you a Stamford Bridge pass then, I reckon. Want me to talk to JT?”  
  
“Fuck you!” Xabi grins, the Yankee twang in his voice now more pronounced than ever. “QPR till I die. Is bad enough I had to go through half of Fat Frank’s autobiography after you gave it to me. For my _birthday_.” _You arsehole_ needs not be verbalized.  
  
“I’m thinking of coaching Liverpool's first team. For a while.”  
  
Xabi looks to the water, doesn’t ask anything.  
  
“I asked them to give me some time to think about it… until after the youth tournament… I didn’t tell him, Xabi.”  
  
He turns to look Stevie in the eye and he sees it then, as clear and vivid blue as he’s always seen it whenever Stevie was buckling under the weight of the world.  
  
“You don’t owe them anything, in fact they don’t even _deserve_ … Your father knew that, he wouldn’t expect you… Dios, Steven!”  
  
It suddenly dawns on Stevie that he hasn’t heard anybody say his name that way in more than eight years.  
  
“I was scared I’d say yes so Dad wouldn’t be disappointed. Di’nt give a fuck about what they said before, about being a coward and hiding behind the Academy and all that shite. Loved every minute of working with the kids.”  
  
“And now?”  
  
“I’m… I’m going to say yes because I miss it.”  
  



	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chrissakes, Finnan, put some pants on!

_September 2004_  
  
“Mr. Alonso…”  
  
Stevie remembers too late that Alonso the elder is himself a former player and that the sight of a dressing room full of half naked, smelly men doing ridiculous celebratory dances is not all that foreign to him. By the time he shakes his hand he feels self-conscious and weird standing there sweaty and shirtless in a sea of discarded socks.  
  
He yells: “Chrissakes, Finnan, put some pants on!” sounding like an exasperated aunt.  
  
Xabi cracks up instantly, his warm, throaty laughter rising above the raucous dressing room.  
  
“My father asked me to meet Steven Gerrard from the first day I signed for Liverpool. I told him your head is big enough already, but he insists.”  
  
Stevie smiles awkwardly, fiddling with his towel.  
  
“Glad we put on a decent display tonight. Hope you’ve enjoyed the trip, sir.”  
  
A quick burst of completely alien sounds, unlike any Spanish Stevie’s ever heard, is exchanged between the two Alonsos and Xabi almost rolls his eyes out by the end.  
  
“The atmosphere was unbelievable, he says... he was very impressed with the fans... He says Michael Owen is a fool,” Xabi adds almost apologetically. “He cannot be trusted to be impartial about Real Madrid…”  
  
“I like your old man,” Stevie tells him as they help each other with their stretches at their first post-Monaco training session. “Knows quality midfielders. Carra didn’t scare him off, did he?”  
  
His voice is only half, or possibly a third mock-concerned.  
  
“No, he loved the tour of Anfield. He was completely... how do you say... like a witch... Enchanted!" Xabi exclaims, victorious, despite Stevie's eyebrows taking an extra moment to recover from confusion. "He found the most perfect audience to talk about Barca legends for hours. I am thinking to apply to the UN, I will not have much competition as a Scouse to Basque translator.”  
  
"Oy, I heard tha', Uni Boy!"  
  
"Both of you are invited to my English classes," Xabi yells back over his shoulder.    
  
Not for the last time for a long while to come, Stevie has a thousand questions he wants to ask this new, strange boy who's Spanish (but not really), who slots into their world effortlessly (but not really), and is a bit shy (but not really, Stevie can tell from the glint in his eye as he ribs Carra some more) and none of the words to ask them.  
  
  
  
 _November 2017_  
  
They’re in some frantic corridor inside the concrete bowels of the Emirates with Football League officials and assorted hangers on swarming around them and Stevie wonders why he just keeps… showing up. Then he sees the press pass hanging on top of Xabi’s navy overcoat. He’s wearing a poppy on his lapel. ‘course he is.  
  
They make inane smalltalk for a couple of minutes and Stevie’s head is splitting, his paracetamol fix having lost its magical powers at some point during the third round of the League Cup a fortnight ago. The pain’s not intense enough to make him truly unpleasant, but persistent enough to make him slightly more irksome than normal.  
  
“You’re still in it,” Xabi tells him earnestly. “You need a decent goal-poacher with a bit more experience up front, but…”  
  
“I need you.” The way Xabi’s mouth opens, closes and silently opens again is oddly satisfying. “For the politics bullshit. For the negotiations, the elbow-rubbing and the fucking canapés and the… the business end of all this.”  
  
He stops only temporarily, the steady drumbeat of the blood in his temples subsiding, his eyes veering to the neat green rectangle of the flatscreen TV hanging above their heads in the tunnel.  
  
“I need you for the way you… see things on the pitch.”  
  
“Stevie… I haven’t been on a football pitch in years. And I haven’t been part of this club in almost a decade. This is a job for someone…”  
  
“I need _you_.”  
  
 _Why are you making this difficult? Why IS this difficult? It really shouldn’t be for any sane, reasonable person. I’m not like you. I didn’t retire a hero. I didn’t retire. I just… went away._  
  
Xabi looks above Stevie’s head from where the murmur of sixty thousand souls permeates the stadium’s whale skeleton. They stand in silence for a few long moments.  
  
“The politics bullshit?”  
  
“You’d be ace at the politics bullshit.”  
  
“Always the charmer. But I don’t think the owners…”  
  
“Fuck them. They want me to stay, they’ll want you on board, not planning on giving them a choice. Package deal.” Stevie’s voice softens. “I know you’re closer to Jon in London…”  
  
“I’ve only flown to Paris once. Since July,” Xabi adds, his eyes downcast like he’s scalded by his own words. “Well… go slaughter Arse. I do not intend to be the big boss director of football of a losing club.”  
  
Stevie’s face aches from the restraint it takes to not fucking explode. He has to rush back to the away changing room, but he turns around after three steps. Xabi’s still there, still looking vaguely sucker-punched, but his eyes are shining.  
  
“Do you need help with the move?”  
  
“I have a laptop, some books, an empty fridge and three boxes that are still unopened in my apartment. I’ll be fine.”  
  
“OK… OK.” Stevie feels the need to say it twice and leaves. This time he trusts that what just happened actually happened.  
  
They lose. The only surprising thing about it is that they don’t lose embarrassingly and don’t lose until the last three minutes. Stevie pats limp shoulders, rubs bowed heads and leaves the pitch last. He kneels to pick up a plastic poppy buried in the grass and puts it in his pocket when his phone buzzes.  
  
 _We’ll have to figure out what a director of football does eventually._  
  
There are pictures in the papers the next day and cheeky headlines and unfunny jokes about Liverpool’s manager kneeling in the grass at the Emirates with a massive, stupid grin on his face.  



	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He imagines the wildest thing Xabi's ever done was to sneak back into the  
> house, past his parents' bedroom, at midnight on a school night. He's wrong, but he doesn't know it.

  
_October 2004_

"To Xabi Alonso!" Carra's voice thunders over the Match of the Day commentary which has half the team huddled  
together in a few booths surrounding the pub's noisiest corner. "The... er... inspiration behind Liverpool's thrilling comeback an'... what was it, Didi?"

"A much more suitable midfield option in this type of tight match than Liverpool's adventurous injured captain," Hamann declares, his Teutonic accented Scouse coming together for a surreally spot on impression of Adrian Chiles.

Stevie's beer is the first to go up in the air.

"Fuck yes, I'll drink to that! Since I'm the only one around here who can have more than one beer... You keep your Champions League football,  
thank you very much," he smiles ruefully and then Xabi thinks Carra says something about taking the piss.

He's not yet completely mastered the art of snatching fragments of coherence from Carra's jaws, but Xabi's already intensley fond of the larger than life lad, plus there's always Sami, his brother from a Scandinavian mother, to act as interpreter when needed.

"That was a crackling goal," Stevie says with unaffected admiration. Their wrists are aligned on the oak table, not quite touching. "Wish we could celebrate it properly, get you well and pissed."

"Is better to celebrate after we win with Deportivo, no?"

"You excited to lock horns with Spaniards again?" Stevie asks before he has a chance to consider that maybe Spanish deer don't necessarily pop up in every day conversation.

"We could use you against Mauro Silva," Xabi responds after a brief moment of wrestling with the mental image.

"Sami's mentioned you rate him almost as much as Guardiola."

"He's a rock! His positioning... he is boss of the midfield. Rafa has already showed everyone the... records... er... recordings of when I could barely keep up with him in La Liga two seasons ago."

"Liverpool got you not him though, didn't we?"

Xabi doesn't have time to mull that though because Sami crashes next to them, a heavy arm landing around his shoulder.

"Alonso was a few classes above Silva even back then. Don't give us that blushing virgin act!"

"'cept for the hair," Riise pipes in all the way from the opposite end of the table.

"Yeh. Shocking hair situation on those tapes, mate!"

"Fuck off, Carra! Way to ruin my Captain pep talk here. The lad's self-confidence will never recover now." Stevie can barely contain his mock exasperation.

Xabi's laughter vibrates through the red leather of the booth and Stevie feels strangely accomplished.

"I have Anfield on my back now," Xabi tells him earnestly once Sami is off to call whichever ridiculous bet he's got going with Didi Hamann this week.

"You don't miss Spain?"

"Sometimes. I miss the food! I miss my family, some friends... But I was a University student living with his parents."

He makes an evocative face that lifts the corners of Stevie's mouth. He imagines the wildest thing Xabi's ever done was to sneak back into the  
house, past his parents' bedroom, at midnight on a school night. He's wrong, but he doesn't know it.

"So I don't miss it that much. And Liverpool is... well... is special..."

He watches Stevie take another sip of his pint, eyes bright, and he doesn't need a conclusion to that statement. He realizes about two seconds too late that he's staring at Stevie's mouth and wishes he could dunk his whole face in his own, considerably smaller pint.

 

 

 _December 2017_

“You OK?”

Xabi nods weakly, his head tilted against the wall, his breath coming out as barely controlled panting.

“We can… take a break,” Stevie offers, eyes fixed on the drop of sweat rolling down Xabi’s copper-stubbled jaw. His own blood is streaming through his veins in torrents, lungs burning.

Although he winces visibly as he pushes himself back on his feet and away from the transparent wall, Xabi chuckles defiantly and lunges behind Stevie to retrieve the abandoned yellow ball from his service box.

“You’re going down in the second half, Gerrard. Three out of five?”

Xabi’s squash raquet booms above his shoulder and Stevie’s legs catch up of their own accord in one quick burst towards the half court line.

“Where were we?”

“Attacking midfield.”

Xabi’s trainers slide across the floor with strident squeaks.

“Coutinho”

“Overhyped, overpaid as fuck and wouldn’t link up with Morgo at all. What is it with you and Brazilians?”

They make their way through all of Europe’s reasonably priced attack-minded players while battering the wall for another twenty minutes and mentally  
raid a fair deal of South American strike options by the time they have to trudge back to the locker rooms.

“Whickam,” Xabi shouts from under the shower. “Home grown, English as the Queen, none of that Brazilian nonsense.”

  
He gets no reaction, but it doesn’t stop him from rattling off about the latest transfer season insanity that’s landed in his inbox in the last three hours alone. He finds Stevie staring at his half open locker, the lines in his forehead drawn tensely together, reflected in the tiny mirror glued to the back of the door.

The dull orange of the prescription pill bottle glares at him accusingly, the way Stevie’s eyes don’t dare to.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I don't want you to be blindsided by some Daily Mail reporter on a slow news day. Mr. Gerrard, were you aware Liverpool's director of football is a pill popping alcoholic who drove everyone away

_January 2018_  
  
At some point after one am, on the last Thursday of the January transfer season, Stevie is struck by how much  
Xabi's Melwood office now looks like a detective's den from a pulp crime novel. However, the meticulously structured whiteboard by his desk is littered with pictures of leftbacks, wingers and strikers (mostly strikers) rather than serial killers and rapists.  
  
The room is dimly lit and spotlessly clean, despite the clutter of pictures, press clippings, folders and assorted Liverpool paraphernalia. Xabi's tennis rackets are leaning against a wall in a corner. It smells and feels like  
Xabi, like everything's where it should be, like controlled chaos. Stevie knows there are crisp white shirts packed neatly in the spacious drawers of his desk, just like he knows the leather sofa in the office is getting plenty of use because the janitors at Melwood have known him for decades now and can't help but want to tell him things.  
  
"Kovačić's agent is in Milan, it's already a done deal," Xabi mutters bitterly into his smartphone and twists in his chair to reach for the offender's mugshot.  
Off the board Kovačić goes and into the trash bin where he lands with a crumpled swoosh.  
  
"Want a refill?" Stevie jiggles his empty Carling bottle in his general direction, hoping to coax Xabi away from staring at his Mac until Neymar materializes from behind the screen demanding a red shirt and a number.  
  
  
"I don't really drink anymore," Xabi says quietly, pinching the bridge of his nose and pressing hard into the inner corners of his eyes. He nods towards the half-empty bottle in front of him. "I don't really drink _too much_ anymore, _"_ like it's important to prove a point to himself.  
  
"Have you tried any pain management therapy? There's got to be specialists..."  
  
Stevie regrets blurting it out as soon as he does it, thinks that maybe it's not his place to pry (not anymore), to give Xabi no choice but to talk about it. He doesn't seem to mind though, looks at Stevie openly and with no trace of surprise.  
  
"I was operated by the best spinal surgeons in the world and it worked for a while. Until it didn't..." Then. "You know I would never do anything to harm the club or this team, right?"  
  
The two little frown lines above his nose deepen.  
  
"That's not why I asked, you tit!" Stevie huffs out fondly. "I saw it live on Sky... I saw you stretchered off the Bernabeu and I _knew_..."  
  
He gives up because he's had about five beers too few do delve any deeper into this particular conversation. There'd been texts and phone calls shortly after Xabi's hospital stay and then there'd been silence. For years."The pills are now just for when it's... like the fire... when it flares. It's under control now, I swear, but that wasn't always the case. I'm sure you must have heard..."  
  
"I don't pay attention to rumors," Stevie cuts him off swiftly, borrowing a swig from Xabi's abandoned beer.  
  
"If it ever comes up though, I don't want you to be blindsided by some Daily Mail reporter on a slow news day. Mr. Gerrard, were you aware Liverpool's director of football is a pill popping alcoholic who drove everyone away and sees his only child three times a year because he can't even look him in the eye? Any comment, sir?"  
  
"Other than fuck off, there's ambulances that need chasing, you shit-peddling snake?... I'd say if you tell me it's under control, then it's under control."  
  
 _You shouldn't trust an addict, Steven._ Xabi bites the inside of his cheek to not say it, distracting himself for the ache pulsating deep inside his rib cage. He feels lighter than he's felt in years though. Or perhaps in weeks, since the first time he'd heard The Kop sing the Alonso song after so many years, perhaps with a  
little less bitter guilt mixed in this time.  
  
"And if you need _anything_..."  
  
"I know," Xabi whispers because he knows, he does know now.  
  
Nothing else is said for plenty of minutes until Xabi says: "Markoutz's people are ready to talk."His fingers launch into a flurry of taps on the keyboard.  
  
~  
  
"I'm flying to Lille at three," Xabi tells him as the team shuffles back to the gym, breaths billowing in the early morning frost with their _Hola-s_ and _Como va, jefe-s_.    
  
Stevie's hair is sweaty, his eyes luminous. No matter how many times Rodolfo makes fun of him for trying to keep up with the youngsters while leaving all the hard work to his assistant manager, Stevie fucking loves morning training sessions and getting a lungful of Melwood in the fog.  
  
"You want to stay over the weekend? We've got phones, the internet..."  
  
"There was no time to make plans with Nagore and well... It will be too frantic anyway. I should be back tomorrow night. I'll know if Markoutz is serious in the first 20 minutes."  
  
Stevie picks up a football and gives it a vicious, satisfying kick for old times' sake. Says casually:  
  
"You should... I was thinking you could bring Jon over on some weekend when things are less crazy around here. Lexie'd love to give him the grand tour at Anfield, the last time he was there he was still trying to walk without falling on his bum."  
  
"He's not interested in football," Xabi smiles warmly and Stevie doesn't understand how he can do that, even though he'd made peace with Lilly Ella's indiference to the beautiful game a long time ago.  
  
"We went to the Donosti Cup with my Dad last summer and he tried but... I think he was just bored. Anyway, I don't want him to feel like he has to, like it's an obligation. He loves computer games, is very good at math..."Stevie can't help but smile himself when he sees the look in Xabi's eyes, wishes he could shove his stupid head in front of the mirror right about now. "He loves Paris, it's a great place for him. I'm taking the train after the game when we go to White Hart Lane in two weeks," he says finally and wraps his black tailored coat tighter around himself.  
  
"I'll call when I know if we have an Austrian striker or not. You staying to freeze your bollocks off some more?"  
  
"Just five more minutes."  
  
~  
  
 _They're wasting our time. His idiot father thinks Chelsea want him. Call you when I land back._  
  
Stevie's hands grip the steering wheel a little harder and he glances into the rear view mirror for the thousdandth time since he'd left Manchester that night.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I saw Neil Mellor get surrounded by a band of guys dressed up as bare-chested angels. It looked like he was drowning in feathers."

_December 2004_  
  
"Bramble?... Really?"  
  
"They're at Garlands and Neil Mellor is gyrating on the dance floor just a few feet to their right, sandwiched between two large men wearing nothing but leather trousers and huge, ethereal angel wings strapped across their hairy chests. Ocassional fake angel feathers float above their heads. They're having an ABBA themed Christmas party.  
  
None of that baffles Carra as much as Sami's pick of Titus Bramble.  
  
"Milner's not that ugly, sure," Sami slurs apologetically, "but Bramble is... how you say? Cattle?... No, 's not right."  
  
"Beefy?" Xabi lucky guesses.  
  
"'s right. And Christ, that was a fucking beautiful own goal!"  
  
To which Carra grunts like it's all starting to fall into place and what the hell has Milner done for us lately anyway? The team choruses something about how he should know and the general agreement that going by own goals Carra is the sexiest man in the Premier League is almost enough to save him from his turn.  
  
Kewell is not that lucky.  
  
"Cahill or Thomas Gravessen?" Sami inquires with all the gravity of a tipsy footballer in a gay club.  
  
"Fuck off, I'm not fucking fucking blue noses!"  
  
"Theoretically fucking, Oz," Stevie reassures him with a smirk.  
  
Jerzy's eyes have gone progressively wider from the moment Sami had convinced the Garlands bouncers to let them inconspicuously slip into a quiet booth towards the back of the club. By now, he looks like a very drunk, very bearded lemur.  
  
"You are all crazy! Alonso, why you encouraging them, you Basque infidel?"  
  
Stevie nudges him in the ribs, in the most captainly way possible.  
  
"Relax, Jerzy, the Pope won't mind a bit of theoretical buggery. You'll get your turn, don't worry."  
  
"You have to pick, Harry," Sami is relentless in his pursuit of Everton confessions from the Australian. "It's called Who Would You Rather for a reason. Milan had to fuck Mancs in theory, you get blueshites. Only fair."  
  
Milan's busting embarrassing dance moves next to and in the general direction of a busty redhead, oblivious to the fate that awaits his dressing room corner the next day. Provided any of his future tormentors stays conscious enough to remember it by then, his locker is on its way to being plastered with posters of Cristiano Ronaldo plus packets of antibiotics and condoms.  
  
"Let Carra fuck them, he's emotionally invested."  
  
"A'right, a'right..." Stevie tries to remember why he'd decided to bring them to Garlands in the first place, but it's all a bit hazy by now. "As your Captain, I'm making an executive decision: Carra gets Everton, you get Spurs later."  
  
A fresh round of beers placates Kewell as much as not having to mentally fornicate with Toffees and Carra surprises absolutely nobody by chosing Gravessen, whose bald head he apparently finds irresistible.  
  
"Stevieeee, my boy....," he purrs, "Freddie Ljungberg or Thierry Henry? Who'd yer rather?"  
  
Sami lets out a prolongued _oooooh_ and all but Jerzy seem to agree the Captain's challenge is the toughest one yet. Jerzy just thinks they're all going to Hell either way.  
  
"Easy one," Stevie blinks fast at his beer. "Ljungberg's a gorgeous man, but come on... an underwear model would never look at the likes of me. And besides... Henry and I got more in common, we're comfortable with each other. I could actually respect him in the morning, you know?"  
  
Xabi squints at him because Stevie's completely stone faced and between the beer and the Scouse it's hard for him to tell just _how much_ he's taking the piss. He could actually physically slap himself over the head for even considering for a second to object to Stevie's insecurities.  
  
Carra has no such inhibitions though.  
  
"Bollocks!" he throws his head back against the booth, howling with drunken mirth. "You're full of it, mate! Ye'v always gone mad for the pretty ones!"  
  
"I made my choice, a'right? Xabi..." Stevie looks straight at him and he suddenly feels a lot less tipsy. "Me or Raúl?"  
  
A few timid protests break out and Kewell objects to the breaking of drinking game rules and the chaos such disturbing antisocial behaviour would lead to, but soon enough a focused silence descends on their booth. All glazy eyes are at least trying to focus on Xabi.  
  
"Raúl is my Captain for longer," Xabi says after careful consideration, his voice as calm as always. "But you know I cannot choose a Madridista, my family would er... take me out of their testament. You... my father has already met and he likes you, I could take you home for the holidays. My mother would probably like you as well, she is always laughing at bad jokes."  
  
"Of course you'd make the most practical choice, you..." Stevie laughs, his thumb fiddling with the label of his beer bottle. He sounds genuinely impressed with the (by now no longer) new guy's banter skills, although the rest are not as kind and try to push him to the dance floor as punishment.  
  
"Fuck's sakes, Alonso, it's not called Whose Babies 'uld Yer Rather 'ave!"  
  
They drag Jerzy along with some difficulty and they eventually join John Arne Riise, Milan and his inseparable redheaded dance partner just in time for Dancing Queen.  
  
"Think we should tell Barros her name's Graham?" Carra shouts over his shoulder, catching Stevie in mid twirl as he tries to swing under Riise's arm. He shrugs, seemingly not having a strong opinion on the matter and loses grip of the Norwegian's hand, crashing into Xabi instead.  
  
"He'll discover soon enough," Stevie laughs into the crook of Xabi's neck then looks up, half confused, half perfectly lucid and hyperaware.  
  
"You are much better looking than Raúl," Xabi says as he'd say _pass the salt_ or _let me know when you burst forward on the left_ and walks off calmly to the bar. Stevie's rooted to the spot while the world goes on spinning to ABBA tunes around him.

_You're fucking pissed, Stevie_ , his brain objects, _Go home!_


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I'm not bringing a 19 year old tattooed Yank kid to room with my teenaged daughter! Not one that looks like he belongs in one of those bands that sing about drugs and offing yourself, the ones you and Lilly Ella are mad about."

_January 2018_  
  
"Why is there a drunk Manc on my couch?"  
  
Stevie takes a deep breath because, as it turns out, rehearsing his speech all throughout the otherwise uneventful drive from Manchester had done fuck all to actually prepare him for this moment.  
  
"He's not a Manc anymore," he says hastily, moving to untie the shoes attached to the inert lump he'd deposited on Xabi's couch. "The kid can drink though, I'll give you that..."  
  
"When you say he's not a Manc _anymore_..."  
  
Stevie drops the lump's shoes by the couch and arranges his own face into what he hopes is not an overtly terrified rictus.  
  
"Mr. Alonso, say hello to Jake Guinto, our brand new striker. Who we're about to sign for free. So before you say anything else, just have a think about it, OK?... We poached a 19 year old kid who could score at Stamford Bridge from his living room while watching the game on TV. Manchester United's been playing hardball with AC Milan and Arsenal for the last three months over him, until it was too late... And Man United get nothing."  
  
Xabi keeps quiet. Stevie would love to know if he's just stunned or stunned and ready to kill him, but his face remains blank. He turns casually towards the kitchen and Stevie hears some clattering resonating around the apartment until Xabi returns holding the biggest salad bowl ever manufactured. He places it carefully on the floor, as near to the sleeping form's head as he can.  
  
"Tell me, Steven, what is my job at Liverpool Football Club?"  
  
Stevie knows the Steven is only broken out in special occasions. Not exactly encouraging. The living room is completely quiet, save for the smooth jazz tones drifting in from Xabi's study and the soft snoring rising from beneath his couch pillows.  
  
"Look, I know..."  
  
"What did I say when I accepted the job?"  
  
Xabi's voice is so unnervingly even, it makes Stevie long for a good old fashioned freakout, some yelling, possibly a dramatic eye-roll, anything really.  
  
"You said we were going to run a tight ship, like the big club we are. No more just 'aving a laugh, no more merry band of whacky misfits, everything under control, no more PR fuckups..."  
  
"Right. No more fuckups. What would you call this... this thing you dropped on my couch then?"  
  
"You also said we'll try to get the best out of the squad by January and then sign someone who can fucking find the net more than twice a season!"  
  
He winces at the sight of Xabi's tight-set jaw twitching, but he's had it with the apologies, goddammit.  
  
"I know this is... sudden. He called me in the middle of the night while you were on a plane and by the time I got to Manchester I found him in this state. Kid's been living there for two years and all that's in his apartment are empty pizza cartons and a mountain of beer cans. He's dead set on leaving the Mancs, they're being cunts and insist on selling him in Italy where he has no intention of going."  
  
"I know."  
  
Stevie can sense Xabi's rancour flaring up from deep beneath his endless supply of composure for the first time. Of course he'd know, the transfer season's biggest drama was rather hard to avoid for someone doing his job the way Xabi does.  
  
"He called me babbling about how much he'd love to play for Liverpool and how nobody else in the whole world can know this, sounded paranoid as hell, but it's Manchester, y'know..."  
  
"What does his agent have to say about this?"  
  
"He fired his agent over the whole mess with the Mancs, doesn't trust him... I know he seems like a bloody handfull, but he's not a bad lad at all."  
  
Stevie's voice softens and Xabi is not quite sure if he has the self-control to not smile. He plays it safe and stares at his shoes, shoving his hands deep in his jeans pockets.  
  
"You want to negotiate and sign a contract with a 19 year old who has no agent and is drunk dialling you to date the bad boy his strict father disapproves of? In 48 hours? Is that what you're saying?"  
  
Stevie ploughs ahead regardless because this is the one hole in his well-rehearsed closing statement he felt quite confident he had managed to plug on his way home. Telling Carra that first team spots for his Academy alumni were about to get even more limited was the one he still considered a work in progress.  
  
"We'll get him a bloody agent, I'll call Struan, he'll know what to do. We need someone we can trust, he could use it too by the looks of it. His Mum remarried and moved back to Oklahoma or some shit place a year after he moved from America, his Dad's apparently a prick he hasn't seen in years and he's 19 and getting fucked over by Manchester United. Just seems like he has nobody in the world right now and well..."  
  
"He's a diva, but can score from his living room, I know. The problem is he's in _my_ living room at the moment. Why isn't he in yours?"  
  
Stevie can see the wheels turning behind Xabi's tired, half-lided eyes, can smell an extra time victory a mile away. _Time to be clinical, Gerrard._  
  
"I'm not bringing a 19 year old tattooed Yank kid to room with my teenaged daughter! Not one that looks like he belongs in one of those bands that sing about drugs and offing yourself, the ones you and Lilly Ella are mad about."  
  
A strangled guffaw emerges from under the pillow.  
  
"Chill, Gerrarhd, you're way more my type than your daughter."  
  
There's coughing and sputtering and Stevie uses his foot to nudge the salad bowl closer to the couch, just in case.  
  
"Gotta sssay tho'... you got that sweeeet-faced school boy thin' going on, but Alonssso... tha's more my type of cougar. No offense."


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Did I hit on you last night by any chance?"

  
_January 2018_  
  
Jake follows the smell of eggs into the kitchen, his stomach rumbling louder with each step. He finds Xabi leaning over the counter where he's perusing The Echo over a cup of coffee, hair still damp, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up.  
  
"Morning...?" it comes out like a question and Jake wants to slap his numb face for the sheer stupidity of it all.  
  
"Yes, it technically still is at this hour. Breakfast?"  
  
Xabi produces a plate without waiting for an answer, operating on the assumption that Stevie did not stop for kebab on the road from Manchester.  
  
"Yeah... sure, thanks."  
  
Xabi takes a quick look at the bedraggled footballer standing in his kitchen and shoving generous amounts of herb-spiced scrambled eggs under his nose. He's a bit taller than on camera, but otherwise the olive skin, the old-for-his age light brown eyes and the absolutely appalling High Street sense of fashion paint the same picture of Jake Ginto, "soccer" prodigy, coveted asset of both his mother and father's footballing nations and all around insufferable primadonna. Not that you could tell from the pathetically hungover figure he cuts in his present circumstances.  
  
"Coffee?"  
  
This time Xabi does wait for an answer and it's an emphatic head shake because Jake's mouth is too busy wolfing down the best fucking eggs he's ever had.  
  
"Um... you got any toast maybe?"  
  
"I don't keep bread in the apartment."  
  
"Oh."  
  
"Plenty more eggs if you want." Xabi finishes the last sip of his coffee and places the cup in the sink, acutely aware that his every move is being carefully scrutinized. "There's also... tea if you feel like it and lots of fresh oranges and... that's about it."  
  
"Did I hit on you last night by any chance?" The kind of silence that comes with its own speakers and mic amped up to the max settles on the room and lingers there instead of an answer. "Oh, man... I'm _that_ guy when I get plastered..." surprisingly, he has the decency to roll his eyes out at himself, although Xabi somehow gets the feeling that Jake doesn't really _do_ soul-searching penitence or anything close to it. "I even hit on a chick once."  
  
Xabi wants to laugh at how casual it all sounds, at how he has possibly missed out on being 19 alltogether.  
  
"At least it prevented you from making advances on your future manager. I assume you haven't changed your mind now that sobriety's starting to hit?"  
  
"Nope." Another mouthful of eggs goes down. "Sign me up! I want to never walk by myself and all that jazz."  
  
Xabi's eyes narrow just the slightest bit and Jake feels like a very green, very insignificant insect.  
  
"There's a change of clean clothes for you in the bathroom. After you're showered and presentable, we're off to meet your new agent. Who is doing this as a favor to Steven Gerrard, by the way... But of course, if you prefer to make some phone calls to someone unaffiliated with us... you just need to make it quick."  
  
"Gerrard's a fucking boyscout, I ain't worried about that," Jake snorts, leaving Xabi to wonder if a fucking boyscout is a compliment or not in the kid's neighborhood. "I'm not the kind of footballer who needs help with tying his shoelaces. I can chew gum and know exactly how much I'm worth to Liverpool at the same time and I can sure read a fucking contract myself."  
  
"You can learn it by heart and recite it in your sleep for all I care, Guinto, but you're not signing a contract with us while unrepresented. Bathroom's second door to the right."  
  
Jake weighs his options for a second and the one that involves taking the afternoon train to Manchester loses.  
  
"Is he going to be OK with me not dating supermodels?"  
  
Xabi turns from the dishes he's drying over the sink, handling them with care to protect his rolled up sleeves, and looks him in the eye for the first time since they've met.  
  
"You're here to play football. He's here to make money off of you playing football. It's none of his business which consenting adults you sleep with and it's none of our business for that matter."  
  
Later, as he rides to Melwood in Xabi's car to the tune of whichever world news station is now contributing to his brain-splitting head ache, the reality of it all starts to actually sink in for Jake.  
  
"I don't date footballers either," he supplies as an afterthought. "Gross legs, shitty attitude."  
  
The corners of Xabi's mouth curl up almost imperceptibly, but he goes back quickly to focusing on the situation in Iran.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Carra says to tell you you're a... erm... blert."

_January 2018_

“It’s 2:23 am. You’re calling me at 2:23 am.”

“I know.”

“So why aren’t you asleep?” Stevie asks conversationally, figuring it’s futile to even attempt righteous indignation at this point.

 _My back hurts_.

“It’s 9:23 PM in Boston. I had a very interesting conversation with our boss a bit earlier. He apparently likes the idea of kidnapping Dennis the Menace from Manchester United.”

"But you still don’t like it?”

“I’ll like it if it works.”

…

“Xabi?”

“Hmm?”

“Is this conversation going somewhere?”

“We’re going to have to have The Talk with him before his transfer breaks out in the media tomorrow”

“It’s 2018 for fuck’s sakes… You’d think we wouldn’t have to.”

“We’ll have to. Jake says nobody at United knows, his agent worked hard to give him hired publicity girlfriends since he came to England,” the note of pure disgust dripping from Xabi’s voice is not lost on Stevie, “but he’s now a disgruntled former employee who’s losing a sizeable commission. Is enough for one whisper to the press… I told him who knows what and what kind of public exposure he wants is all ultimately his decision.”

“Can’t blame the kid for not wanting to be anybody’s hero.”

"Yeah..."

Xabi rubs the pad of his thumb against the ignition of the lighter past his relatively high threshold of pain. The fresh nicotine hit seems more satisfying the deeper he digs the cog into his nail. The lighter is cheap, disposable plastic and he feels slightly ridiculous for keeping it hidden behind the coffee table, on the balcony of an apartment in which he's the only tenant, with the occasional guest like the one currently sleeping on his couch. It dawns on him that some habits are harder to break than others.

"Are you outside?"

"On the balcony." Xabi's always loved the eerie, dull buzz of the Dock at night. He realizes he's been numb to the cold for a while now. "I'm sorry, you should go back to bed, need your sleep of beauty for the press tomorrow."

"I'm taking Lou to the dentist in about five hours, what I need is a stiff Jack and Coke."

Judging by the sounds of rustling fabric, he knows Stevie has now moved to the living room couch.

"Something I realized earlier today..." Xabi's mouth tastes bitter when he pushes his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "Jake was born the year I debuted in the first team with La Real, you know. He shouldn't have to be anybody's hero by now."

"No... he shouldn't." He can hear the same tinge of defeat that coats his tongue reflected in Stevie's voice. "But the lad'll find his own way. I'm far more worried about him being an ex Manc to tell you the truth. Yank and Manc are just begging to be put to some interesting uses in stadium chanting... And I'm not talking about rival fans either..."

Xabi's face breaks out into a full blown grin that reminds him of just how cold his cheeks are.

"Good luck with Lola tomorrow. Don't mess up her front teeth, she is so far the only person in the whole of England who pronounces my name correctly."

"Go to sleep, Javier!"

"OK."

He doesn't.

 

_14 April 2005_

_6 missed calls from Steven_.

All of them drunk-dialing from a Southport pub (pubs) while Xabi's almost collapsed in the Stadio delle Alpi dressing room with relief and adrenaline fading from his blood stream, barely supported by fatigued muscles that aren't quite ready for this level of exertion after almost four months out of the game.

It's seventh time lucky for Stevie in the morning, right before Xabi boards the plane that's going to take them back to Liverpool as semifinalists of the Champions League, there but for the grace of Cannavaro hitting the post, but there with a fighting chance.

"I still can't believe it's real," Stevie's throat is scratchy with telltale signs of the impending hangover he hadn't slept enough to get just yet.

Xabi wonders if Stevie has any idea how many hours have passed since the last time he hung up on him the previous night or if in his mind they're just continuing the same one-sided conversation.

"Good morning, Captain. It is real... It happened. Carra says to tell you you're a... erm… blert. He heard you couldn't even watch the game."

"Tell him I was too worried he'd score a beaut for Juventus..."

"Are you all right?" there's an edge to the question that goes straight to the pit of Stevie's stomach.

"Nothing a beer won't fix. Listen, last night... Did I... say anything...?"

Xabi's quiet for far longer than he'd want to be.

"You said many things. Well... you _tried_. You did not make much sense."

_You said you wanted to kiss me. But not like Raúl would kiss me, you were pretty clear on that... "snog you senseless" was the exact expression._

"Sorry 'bout that... erm... whatever it was."

Xabi ducks out of sight from his team mates, hiding behind the Hermes stand at the duty free store when he realizes he's chewing on the nail of his index finger. He's suddenly irrationally angry at himself. His voice stays deceptively warm though.

"I do not listen to you when you're sober, let alone drunk, don't worry..."

Before Xabi gets the chance to hang up on him again, they agree that once they're through to the final Stevie can take his turn at drunk-dialing.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "When his forehead creases in that way, is a good sign."

_February 2018_

Jake tells himself he is not going to let it all get to him the first day he steps onto the pitch wearing the other red shirt. It's an away game at Crystal Palace and at least he doesn't have Anfield to worry about, or so he thinks, until he comes onto the pitch to the tune of the loudest singing from an away side he'd ever heard. The game is a plodding, tortuous affair full of ugly football from both sides and his head feels like it's dunked in ice water the whole time. It's not the kind of refreshing, sobering type of sensation most people would associate with the image. He just feels cold and numb and ineffective.

Disconnected.

His brain refuses to cooperate and no matter how closely he's watched Lussey and Lucas in training, no matter how many times he'd gone over the schemes with both  coaches, his mind is utterly, morning-before-trig-midterm-test blank and he knows deep in his bones that he wouldn't be able to find his new teammates with a map and a flashlight.

Sixteen minutes after halftime, after Stevie's arm wrapped around his shoulder and the encouraging-but-pointed dressing room indications, he loses the ball (again) like a fucking amateur and Palace inevitably score from the counter and then score again three minutes later. On some level, Jake's rational mind knows he's just being paranoid, but when Stevie doesn't sub him out despite missed sitter after bad pass after failed link-up with the midfield, he starts to think it's on purpose so that the taunts of "fucking useless Yank" and "5th Column Fergie Boy" ( _Seriously... how do they even come up with that shit?_ ) can pour over him like holy water from the baptistry.

Absolution finally comes in the 77th minute and Jake wishes Stevie didn't smile at him and didn’t give him a pat on the back before he buries his head in a towel on the bench.

His equally dejected teammates mostly spare him from consolation attempts in the dressing room, which is fine by Jake, but the reprieve is only temporary. At some point after a fortnight of shoddy, goaless performances and lonely training sessions filled with monosyllabic conversations spill over into the front pages of Merseyside's football comentariat, the team bonding exercise feels like an inevitability. It's Lucas who comes up with the brilliant idea to do opposition research for their upcoming Europa League fixture over dinner. Stevie is as impressed with the Brazilian's leadership abilities as he is with himself for naming a Liverpool Captain agile enough to volunteer both Xabi's apartment and his cooking skills for the event and get away with it. Lucas' Madonna-and-Child Raphaelite smile tended to have that effect on people.

Jake's mildly relieved to see that he's the least uncomfortable squad member currently dragging their feet about Xabi's living room, desperately trying to find a spot where they would not be disturbing any of the minimalist furniture. Adam Morgan shoves his hands in his pockets and stares dumbfounded at the rows of DVDs lined up over half a living room wall as if the titles were inked in Phoenician.

"Think some of these are nudies like?"

"They're probably French and everyone sleeps with their hairy cousins and they're all depressed about it. Not even you'd get off on that," Lussey nudges him gently like one would drag a kindergartener away from the glue pot.

It's fairly obvious to all involved, Jake foremost of all, that it's not just the spotlessness and foreignness of Xabi's apartment that has every Liverpool player present, except maybe Lucas, walking on egg shells, but that the main elephant in the room is a pachidermus americanus. Jake knows on some level that he’s never known how to do… this, he’s felt it even on junior high pitches during goal celebrations where he’d still be on the outside looking in even in the middle of the pile. It's not like he tunes everyone out on purpose, it's not that...

He's suddenly aware that Lucas is peering over his shoulder at the screen of his phone, but since he's currently filming Stevie's arrival in the kitchen with overflowing Auberge Delicatessen bags in hand and the intense conversation he's engaged in with Xabi over the fragrant pot on the stove, he's not exactly on high ground when it comes to privacy.

"When his forehead creases in that way, is a good sign," the Captain beams his most radiant smile at him, stopping Jake just short of asking if it's like reading tea leaves or runes.

"Was this his idea or yours?" he asks instead, eyes still focused on the minuscule screen where Xabi has Stevie sampling their dinner off a massive ladle. Jake can't read forehead wrinkles yet, but he knows what licking your fingers means.

"Mostly mine."

Jake shuts off his camera when he notices Stevie approaching them.

"Everything a'right in there?"

Stevie shoves his hands in his pockets with an air of relief about him.

"Dinner should be ready in ten minutes. We had a minor cumin crisis, but it's all sorted out now. Apparently there's more than one kind," he mumbles under his breath.

“It smells a bit weird…” Lussey says tentatively from his corner of the couch where he’s grappling with the massive modernist architecture album he’d unwisely picked up from the coffee table.

“Listen up, you lot,” Stevie’s voice rises to a loud whisper to make sure he’s reaching the stragglers at the back of the room. “There’s a Basque man cooking his grandmother’s stew in there and he’s been at it since 3 PM. I’ve done this before so here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to eat it and you’re going to fucking love it. You will complement the cumin notes and you’ll say thank you when you’re done…”

Stevie’s voice is in clear Coaching mode and the pack reacts accordingly, for the most part.

“Maybe we could order some pizza for later, just in case…,” Morgan’s voice squeaks with the hopeful naiveté of the truly clueless.

“… _you will ask for seconds_!” and if there was ever any doubt about just how serious Stevie is, it’s clearly removed by the look he shoots his hapless striker. “He can and _will_ sell you to Tranmere Rovers come next transfer window and don’t think he wouldn’t… He can sell me too while he’s at it. Lussey, Jordi, you’re setting the table!”

~

"Guinto? It means Gold in Tagalog."

"Tagla wha?"

Jake stops for a moment from bending over the kitchen trash can where he’s in charge of clearing a pile of plates.

"It's one of the main languages spoken in The Philippines."

"I'm just pulling your leg," Morgan laughs, playing with a sienna kitchen towel. Not that he'd know where to find sienna on a color chart. "I _am_ a thick Scouser, no doubt about that, but I've read Manny Pacquaio’s biography, mate," he beams proudly and Jake doesn’t have the heart to tell him he has only the very faintest idea of who he’s talking about.

"Besides, we looked you up on Wikipedia when St... the boss announced you were joining us," Lussey clarifies, rinsing the last of the dinner plates and stacking them neatly in the dishwasher. "Weirdest bit was the one about getting arrested for practicing free kicks inside a cargo plane."

"I wasn't arrested, I was 9 years old," Jake protests. "My old man used to do maintenance on RAF planes and… Akrotiri’s one of the most boring stations out there. Had to keep myself entertained somehow and the security around VC10s wasn't designed with 9 year olds in mind, y’know..."

"So... if you're English and Filipino, how come you have a Yank accent?"

The irony of being the one to bring up someone’s accent is completely, predictably lost on Morgan.

"I grew up mostly around my Mom and we moved to the Bronx when my parents split."

“Xabi lived in New York before he came back here, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, in _Williamsburg_ ,” Jake snorts as much as a reaction to Lussey’s maddening earnestness (he’s like a velvety eyed spring fawn and it’s unsettling for Jake to be the jaded, cynical douchebag with one who’s supposed to be his elder) as to the idea that a loft dweller in Williamsburg could ever be mistaken for a New Yorker.

“You into hip hop?”

“The good kind, yeah… None of it was made before we were ever born, in New York or elsewhere.”

“Bollocks,” Morgan objects huffily, “Kanye forever!”

Xabi pauses the UEFA DVD and he looks down at where Stevie is sitting cross-legged on his living room floor, busy scribbling notes down on a legal pad and observing the three youngsters on dishwasher duty. Stevie looks ridiculously young to him to the point where he forgets for a brief instance who these kids in red jerseys are and what the hell they're doing in his kitchen.

~

There are no leftovers to put away by the end of dinner and Vanleberghe, who's small, quiet, Belgian and so stuffed he can barely focus on any of the lively debate about the merits of FC Basel's rhomboid midfield, asks for the recipe for his mother.

"It has been a family secret since the Spanish Civil War, you'll have to take an oath of silence and swear you will use only original ingredients to maintain its Basque authenticity,"

Jordi Vanleberghe swallows hard, suddenly beetroot red.

"Um. OK..."

"I'll print it out from you off Epicurious, it has only some modified spices," Xabi chuckles, feeling magnanimous enough to let Vanleberghe breathe again and rewinding once more over Basel's corner kicks.

Stevie wants to ask how he does that when he can barely get Morgan and Lussey to stop calling him Stevie G, but knows the ability to make grown men freeze with a carefully placed side glance is not something one simply learns. He slips out to the balcony by the fifth replay and finds Jake sprawled out on Xabi's chair, savoring a good long drag of his cigarette.

"These things will kill me, I know," Jake self-lectures pre-emptively.

"Not if Xabi gets to you first. Are you raiding his stash?"

"Brought my own."

Stevie zips up his hoodie and takes the unoccupied seat on the lawnchair by Jake's side, looking up at the starless sky.

"I don't even get a lecture about professionalism and sacrifice for the team?"

Stevie shrugs, focuses on his breath coming up in steam billows in the night air.

"I don't think that's your problem… Don't know how much you read about the club, but basically everyone's convinced I'm a shit manager and they're just too polite to tell me. It's not this big debate or anything... It's just kind of agreed by now that my heart's in the right place but I'm going to join the many players before me who didn't transition very well into the gaffer job. That if it weren't for Xabi pulling my strings and keeping me from flying into stupid, rash decisions, we'd be relegated already. I suppose they have a point with that one..."

He can tell he's got Jake's attention by the way his back straightens against the chair.

"Thing is... those people were dead set on believing that before we ever signed you because we didn't time travel and win the FA Cup seven months in advance or because I didn't put on a kit at half time and banged in a hattrick against United during the last derby."

"You probably could. Or at least you'd be a safer bet than any of us."

"Good lad, that's the spirit!"

Jake throws him a quick look, but doesn't insist on his scoring record.

"This is what playing for this club's always been about. Doesn't matter that we're a midtable team and have been for years, or that I'm new to managing in the Premier League or that we have the youngest squad in the competition, it's never been any different. But you know what's one of the best things about playing for this club? Getting to prove the idiots wrong."

Jake takes a long drag of his cigarette, shakes his head with a smile.

"You're not _that_ crap at this, you know?"

Stevie pushes his chair back and yanks the cigarette out of Jake's mouth before heading back inside.

"Cut that shit out or I'll have you run laps around Melwood till you puke your lungs out," he says softly, but Jake knows he means it far more than his cheeky smirk would indicate.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His voice is soothing, his white teeth are perfect and his waxy eyebrows are perfect and the very existence of multilingual passing savant Mikel Arteta makes Stevie feel even stupider today of all days.

  


_February 2018_

There's no booing the next Saturday when Jake gets his next, highly debatable Premier League start against Spurs. It's much worse than that, it's a murmur, it's the traveling Kop quietly chorusing their tribal distrust of him and dislike of their manager's decision. Jake doesn't play up the selfish shot-hogging, chance-wasting striker cliché all that much and doesn't manage to prove them all that wrong either, reveling in his mediocrity until, with three minutes left on the clock and staring at a creditable blank draw at White Hart Lane of all football grounds in the land, he curls an unreal cross to Morgan, even though he's out of position and with two Spurs defenders on his tail. It's weightless, beautiful and unstoppable and all Adam has to do is help it politely into the net.

Stevie can't stop grinning during the press conference and in the generalized bedlam that ensues after a crucial win he forgets to check his phone until they're on the bus on their way back with most of the lads either sound asleep or trying to ignore Bernd Leno’s snoring to get there.

He fires a quick text and forgets about it again for the next two days.

_Say Hi to Jon._

By day three Stevie twirls his phone between his knuckles while supervising five-a-sides at Melwood and on Wednesday he asks Xabi's secretary if he's called or left any messages. He's in Xabi's office on day five because... well... that's where all the alphabetized files of the club's scouts happen to be. Stevie's ready to tell him he's a jackass and he's paying for dinner next time as soon as he sees a foreign country code on the display of Xabi's office phone.

The voice on the other end is decidedly female and definitely not Basque-accented (faint German rather) and informs him politely that since Mr. Alonso is not currently available on his mobile phone, she would kindly require him to confirm his next appointment via email.

Xabi shows up late to the weekly meeting on Friday, accessorizing the shadows under his eyes with a steaming cup of Starbucks and a dogged determination to avoid any type of eye contact.

"How's Jon?” Stevie asks a propos of nothing as they’re headed out of the conference room.

Xabi looks him straight in the eyes for a couple of seconds, a shadow of annoyance unmistakable in the set of his jaw.

“He’s great.”

It’s both jarring and unsurprising to realize what a terrific liar Xabi can be. He’s had years now to get used to the idea, but this time it sets Stevie’s teeth on edge. He tells himself that if he were a good friend, he’d say something, he’d voice his concerns or otherwise stay the fuck out of a grown man’s business. He’s terrible at being Xabi’s friend though so Stevie sits and watches and doesn’t miss a beat, none of the little ripples in Xabi’s behavior that tell him something’s off, and he says nothing.

They win at Anfield the next weekend and Stevie pretends he doesn’t notice that Xabi’s not there, even manages to go through most of the preparations for the last 32 of the Europa League without giving him much thought.

It’s not until Xabi pulls out of their midweek Merseyside Legends charity game without an explanation and via the club’s fucking press officer that the bitterness hits back like nausea. That’s how Mikel Arteta ends up being on the wrong end of Stevie’s glares and of one or three noncharitable tackles (for the children). He’s Basque and he’s an indelible part of Xabi's past and from what Stevie’s gathered he’d reconnected with Xabi after his move to London in the summer. And his fucking hair still doesn’t move, not even the few shards of silver around his temples. That’s good enough for Stevie. He’s duly ashamed of himself by the end of the match when he shakes Mikel’s hand and they pose for the camera with some of the kids from the foundation. Stevie thanks him profusely for representing Everton to the event and mumbles a half-hearted question about his shin.

“It actually felt good in a way,” Mikel smiles genuinely, “Kids today don’t know how to get properly stuck in, Merseyside-style. I missed that.”

His voice is soothing, his white teeth are perfect and his waxy eyebrows are perfect and the very existence of multilingual passing savant Mikel Arteta makes Stevie feel even stupider today of all days.

“You never liked me,” Stevie mutters, suddenly feeling like his knees should be skinned and his kit should be three sizes too big and his fingers should be sticky with candy gloop. “But you’re always so fucking nice, it’s like they _breed_ you polite, like it's in your DNA over there.”

Mikel’s actually shaking with laughter, real, human laughter which Stevie finds inexplicably unsettling.

“He’s as much from over here as he is from over there by now, you know,” he says, still chuckling. “I don’t know how you did it, we all thought he’d wanted to erase us all, to erase football from his life after the way it ended for him, but here he is... And giving him this... mission... It means everything to Xabi, you should know that. This club has always been in his heart no matter where he was over the years.”

Mikel is no stranger to finding your calling outside of your homeland, but he also knows he could never be drawn to one grey, cold, humid little spot on the map in quite the same way. The realization finds him driving on a mostly empty Catalan road on a night in May when he suddenly starts speeding to the tune of a screeching radio commentator who almost chokes on Vladi Šmicer’s name. By the time he gets to the first small town pub with a TV set, Xabi heads for the spot and Stevie tells him something before he goes to set the ball down and Mikel sees it all through Xabi’s eyes, sees him missing then lunging desperately on the rebound and his rib cage is too small for his heart when he sees Xabi laying flat on the pitch, submerged under a red wave. Mikel drives the rest of the way to Barcelona with adrenaline sloshing about in his blood stream for a buzz more powerful than the placebo beer could ever provide. For years to come, he will always remember it every time Pepe or Luis or Fernando bitch about the Merseyside weather during one of their many dinners at the Dock and all Xabi ever has to say on the subject is _I love the rain_.

“You should talk to him.”

“Do you know... Do you think he’s in trouble?”

Mikel shrugs eloquently.

“Xabi has never been very good at asking for help. I don’t know anything specific, but I know he’s been under a lot of stress just by talking to him on the phone. You work in the same building though..." His green-flecked eyes remain guarded and Stevie chews his lower lip and nods for a silent thank you.

He shakes Mikel's hand again, this time like he means it, and holds it for a few seconds before they part ways.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> objectively speaking, Riise has what they would call a nice, tight arse...

_16 April 2005_

_I’m sorry._

It feels like it’s all Stevie’s been saying all day. It feels like he’ll never get to say it enough.

He stays quiet when Xabi finds him leaning against the wall of the most shit pub Carra or Didi (most likely Didi) could find for a team get-together nobody actually feels like having. It had seemed as good a place as any to get smashed in the aftermath of Liverpool’s Champions League dreams-sinking draw against the Spurs. Now, with rain pissing down on his shoes and beer ineffectively sloshing about in his veins, Stevie is stone cold sober and thinks this was a fucking terrible idea to begin with. Xabi is pretty much the last person he wants to see right now.

_Just my luck._

“You’re going to catch a cold,” Xabi squeezes next to him under the narrow eaves.

“Good. There’s a chance it’ll kill me.”

“Stevie, this is not the end of the world…”

Xabi regrets the would-be soothing words as soon as they’re spoken, not because there’s a high chance he just came across as patronizing and dismissive of a man whose propensity to beat himself up could propel steam engines if put to good use, but because between the ugly rain and the darkness and the date in the calendar, it kind of feels untrue. Maybe he should have let him wallow in peace.

“I qualified fucking Everton to the Champions League, haven’t I?”

“They will build you a statue.” Xabi’s head rolls along the cold brick wall to catch a glimpse of Stevie’s eyes through the early night gloom. “They had their contribution to it, is not just one penalty…”

Stevie’s forehead drops and he kicks limply at the rain drops with the tip of his trainers.

“One goal post, one fucking guy with gloves sitting in the middle of it. What kind of idiot doesn’t beat those odds?”

“Stevie,” Xabi decides that getting only the lower half of his legs rained on doesn’t really make much sense and gets in Stevie’s face before he has a chance to reconsider the uncomfortable closeness. “The rest of us also played in that game, in case you are already forgetting… You are not your own team. You are completely irrational!”

“Am I? I’m the fucking Captain, it’s my job to show up when it counts! I’m supposed to pull you up, not drag you down…”

“Shut up!”

It’s the last thing he’ll hear clearly for the rest of the night, before all the blood in his face drains, before his head is buzzing with the intoxicating taste of cigarettes and rain and frustration mixed on Xabi’s lips. _I thought he quit… he only smokes when he’s stressed out… top job, Stevie!_ , he thinks, absurdly, when what he would have imagined he’d be thinking was _You’re kissing a bloke!_ _You’re kissing Alonso… What the FUCK are you doing?_ Maybe it should be paralyzing him with fear and maybe he should freeze from the mere shock of it, but he doesn’t. All Stevie feels is warmth and his whole body coiled tight by the sheer force of his want with no part of him more electrified than the bicep Xabi’s gripping in his fingers to keep him in place, the spot on which the Captain’s armband seared his skin earlier.

Instead, it’s Xabi who looks stunned when they break for air, the light from the meek, yellowish street lamp sweeping over his cheekbones.

“Took you long enough...” Xabi's own breath feels foreign on his swollen lips.

In years to come the pure fucking exhilaration he feels in this very moment as Stevie fists his hands in his leather jacket and pins him against the wall with his hips despite (and because of) the drunk revelers stumbling just a few feet from them around the corner should serve as a warning. Right now he could care less if Rafa showed up and tapped him on the shoulder though.

“I have keys,” he growls stupidly against Stevie’s mouth when Stevie’s wet fingers find an opening between his belt and his shirt. “Luis’ keys… he is spending the weekend at his girlfriend’s place...”

“Mhmmm…”

Stevie’s far beyond being articulate. He’s warm and alive beneath Xabi’s hands and content to let him do the thinking and the lying and the planning ahead. The shock hits him later, when it’s too late and he’s too wired to care for too long, his fingers tangled in Xabi’s hair and his breath coming out in hot pants though mouthfuls of Xabi’s pale skin. It crashes against him when Stevie realizes he’s never wanted anything more in his whole life, not the League, not the World Cup, not fucking Lilleshall, freeing him from his last remnants of sanity.

The next time he’s in the shower with a bunch of naked guys soaping themselves leisurely after training, Stevie tries to make sense of it all for the first time and does his best to discreetly assess which of his non-Basque team mates he’d most want to fuck.

_Milan_ ’s _the cute one, right? He's well fit and his hair’s not that much longer…_

He also thinks that, objectively speaking, Riise has what they would call a nice, tight arse and tries hard to focus on Finnan’s brash, manly charm, but well… it turns out he can’t look at their bodies any differently than he had looked 48 hours ago. There’s no sweet, primal ache in his lower belly to compare to the frightening pull he feels towards one man alone.

So he's not gay. He's Alonsosexual. Like that's supposed to make him feel any better, like his world is any less upside down, like he’s any less of a liar and cheater. Like he’s any less exasperatingly aware of the raw thump echoing through his blood every time Xabi is anywhere near him.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm writing a book.

_February 2018_

Stevie knows that standing outside the office of the director of football of LFC, glaring at his innocent secretary, is perhaps (OK, definitely) not the best use of his time as the manager of LFC. He does… he just really doesn’t give a shit. All pretenses of casual stalking are dropped when Xabi emerges from his lair carrying an entire semester’s worth of course work packed neatly in red folders in one hand and the phone that’s surgically attached to his palm in the other.

“Can I talk to you for a moment?”

Stevie’s pace is still miles better than his so if Xabi’s planning to shake him off by powerwarlking through the office corridors he’s in for a shock.

“Depends. Is it about tactical periodization?” Xabi dusts off a piece of lint off his forest green cardigan and tries to speed up again. Stevie simply adjusts his step effortlessly. _My legs are longer than yours, asshole_. “I have a meeting with the sport science guys and our docs in… seven and a half minutes. So do you, by the way. Have you read Doc’s report?”

“Yes, I’ve read the fucking report. Wanna quiz me on The Four Pillars? How about anaerobic endurance drills?” Stevie realizes he’s going about it arse backwards, but goddamn it the man infuriates him sometimes and all the fucking time lately. He has the element of surprise on his side when he shoves Xabi inside the conference room, mumbling something about how just because they can’t figure out what Xabi’s job is, it doesn’t mean the rest of them can’t try to do theirs.

“… you know-it-all jackass!”

“What the fuck…”

The lock slides into place with a metallic click behind Stevie’s back and he leans against the door, feet planted firmly on the floor as if they’re in a bind and he’s been called to play at right back for the last ten minutes again.  

They speak at the same time.

“What are you doing?

“Where the hell were you?”

“Excuse me?”

“You sure as fuck weren’t in Paris...”

Xabi drops the pile of folders onto the conference table.

“We’re not in the bloody military, I don’t report to you, Steven!” He rubs his jaw indignantly. “Open the door, our guests will be here any minute,” he adds in a more conciliatory tone, making a move for the exit. He thinks better of it when he sees Stevie’s back going rigid against the door. It makes him want to smile, even though he’s nowhere near in the mood for it.

“What, you’re going to tackle me?”

“If I have to.”

“Fine, be a child. I don’t have time for your neurosis and they’re waiting for us…”

“They’ll be fine, Rodolfo has some crackin’ drinking stories,” Stevie sounds more tired than his outrage would call for. “If it’s not this meeting there’ll be another meeting, or a conference or the next game or some shite you’d use an excuse to avoid me. Figured I’d rather keep them waiting than Newcastle United.”

Xabi closes his eyes for the duration of a long exhale, looks for something to do with his hands that would keep them from wrapping themselves around Stevie’s neck. He pours himself a glass of water he has no intention of drinking.

“Those people have traveled all the way from London. Do you have any idea how unprofessional this makes us look?”

“You mean like vanishing without a word for almost a week? Like letting me read off the club’s website that you were bailing on a charity match that was _your_ idea and fucking lying to me about going to see Jon?”

The name lands like a slap to the face and for a couple of seconds Xabi can’t even focus his eyes.

“I did go to see Jon,” he says quietly. “Just not the whole week…”

Stevie knows he’s not getting anything else without a push.

“Someone from Switzerland called to reschedule your appointment. I thought… Fucking hell, I diagnosed you with half a dozen types of cancer trying to figure out why they could only be cured in goddamn Zurich and then you show up back here acting like a massive git… Are you all right?”

This time Xabi really does feel like smiling in earnest.

“I’m OK.”

“Don’t fucking lie to me,” Stevie pleads, his hands sliding helplessly off the door knob he was clutching behind his back.

“I will be OK… Honest. I had to reschedule some tests so I can go see Jon. I… There is this experimental back pain treatment. It’s a therapy based on stem cells, not yet approved in the European Union, all the research’s being done in Switzerland for now.” He shrugs like there isn’t really a more articulate way to put it. “I volunteered as an... err… guinea pig.”

“And you couldn’t just fucking say so???” Stevie slumps against the door, his breath finally unhitched from his throat.

“There are still ways in which it could go wrong. The last thing Liverpool needs is more media speculation. I didn’t mean to…,” Xabi leans against the conference table, grips the edge to steady himself. “Just look at how you’re reacting.”

“What do you mean…wrong? Is it dangerous?”

“Nobody’s quite sure yet, we signed a release form so they can find out. You’d be surprised how many people would risk it all to be free from back pain, I practically had to audition. When we drew Basel I asked them to speed up some of the tests so I could have the first procedure after the game.”

Xabi looks at Stevie expectantly, but he’s obviously still processing it all.

“Is it going to get rid of the pain for good?”

“Eventually…” Xabi reconsiders the water afterall, his throat feels parched.

“But?”

“No but. Is just…” He studies his shoes for a while then says: “I’m writing a book.”

“Oh. I see,” Stevie breathes out in the way of people who really, really don’t. “What’s it about?”

Xabi shuffles off the table, the red folders and the locked door now long forgotten.

“It’s a crime story, but... not really. I suppose by now that's a pretext. It's about a man who tries to make peace with the past by trying to solve an old case from the 1950s."

"Is it depressing?"

"Sometimes..."

"Can I read it?"

"It's in Spanish. Well, most of it is, sometimes I think clearer in English now... It's not finished anyway and it drives me crazy many times, but... I've been writing it for a couple of years now, ever since I started to get cleaned up... I wrote plenty of my freelance articles when I was... not cleaned up, but this was different.” Xabi’s voice drops to a whisper and Stevie finally budges from his guard spot. “At first it helped at night with the insomnia, it helps to replace one frustration with another; I've been trying to find the perfect ending for a few months now and I've been thinking... "

"Yeah, that's always been your problem. It's still going to be great even if you don't suffer for your art."

"I'm going to run out of excuses for everything else though."

Stevie sees Xabi’s fingers drumming a slow pattern on the table and the way his heart thuds against his chest… it makes him hate himself for it, just a little.

"So... your detective guy... Does he catch his killer?"

"Yes, but he has to make a choice if he wants to have him punished and prevent him from hurting others in the future or stay in the past with the woman he loves."

As far as Xabi’s concerned, the look on Stevie’s face, complete with scrunched up nose, is worth all the aggravation that’s lead them up to this point.

"There's time travel?!?"

"There goes your vote of confidence,” Xabi laughs warmly, “It's not like that, no special effects, it's more... symbolic, like..."

He stops because he realizes it sounds terribly stupid, even to himself. Two sets of electronic chimes erupt simultaneously, saving Xabi from having to do any more back cover blurbs.

“Rodolfo’s threatening to strangle us both with the cables of the projector,” Xabi reads off his phone with a certain amount of poetic license.

Stevie's all ears during the meeting, has pertinent questions and takes notes frantically like a med student. By the end of the x-ray slideshow he is intimately acquainted with the soft tissues and hamstrings of every squad member and knows far more about Lucas' groins than anybody  would have any legitimate business knowing.  Halfway through the Q&A session though he discreetly reaches for his phone and Xabi's back pocket starts buzzing.

_Im going with u._

_Like hell you are, you have an away game at WestHam 3 days after Basel._

_IM GOING WITH U._


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It was a hard bare masculine bedroom with a polished wood floor, a couple of small throw rugs in an Indian design, two straight chairs, a bureau in dark grained wood with a man's toilet set and two black candles in foot-high brass candlesticks…"

_March 2018_

“How bad?”

Jake ignores Xabi’s chat with the doctor like they’re two uncles having one of those right-over-your-head, dead serious grownup conversations about his future. He has a nagging feeling he’s about to be sent to a boarding school conveniently located in the most remote part of the Swiss Alps.

“It’s just a knock…” he mumbles. The synthetic material of the infirmary bed clings to Jake’s sweaty, aching limbs.

“Thank you for your professional opinion, Doctor Guinto. If you don’t mind, you could maybe wait with the self-diagnosis after we get your ankle scanned,” Doc Iqbal suggests calmly.

Xabi pats the Doc on the back and they chat for another couple of minutes as Xabi walks him out. As much as Jake would like to be left alone right now and for the remainder of their short stay in Switzerland, he knows that’s just not how things work around this part of Merseyside.

“Don’t _ever_ do that again,” Xabi says, a blade of steel running through his voice.

“Never score a hattrick in Europe? I can do that…”

The chair Xabi pulls to sit across from Jake’s bed scrapes with metallic unpleasantness.

“You and I both know you’re not a stupid player so don’t play stupid with me. You scored that last goal on a swollen ankle and that’s a risk you should never take. When you’re out there on the field, that’s not your ankle, that’s Liverpool’s ankle and you have no right to risk our next games to get your numbers on the board.”

Jake chews the inside of his cheek, swallowing words that he knows are unwise because he really isn’t a stupid son of a bitch, no matter how much he wishes that weren’t the case some days.

“Somebody had to score. We were out of Europe at 2-2…”

“Lussey managed just fine from the midfield after you hobbled off the pitch. Now we have to figure out whom to play up front against West Ham in three days if your scan doesn’t come out clean…”

Xabi wets his lips, looks away from the ugly truth of the predicament the club is in and for which this kid is not responsible in the least. He’s got a message to deliver though, fairness be damned.

“They love Lussey,” Jake lifts his eyes, ignoring the throbbing in his ankle. “Like they loved you. So don’t tell me how hard I have to work to get them to sing about me… You had your own freaking Beatles song as soon as you were off the plane!”

“That I did…” Xabi’s face softens.

“And you still ditched them.”

 _Well, fuck._ Two can play this game.

“There were two things I came to say to you before you go back to the hotel,” Xabi reaches inside his duffel coat and Jake takes the phone he produces from his pocket.

“Tomorrow’s front page of The Liverpool Echo,” Xabi clarifies, just in case Jake’s inclined to think that the picture of himself scoring off his wrong foot from an impossible angle and the bold, red caption above it are the work of bloggers with too much Photoshop time on their hands.

“I didn’t think Scousers read books,” Jake says, trying in vain to rein his voice in and not give away the dryness of his throat.

“Get to bed as soon you get back to the hotel, Your Highness,” Xabi smiles as he retrieves his phone. “The Half Blood Prince… Has a nice ring to it, no?”

~

Stevie’s surprised at the absence of the dreaded hospital smell when he steps inside the semi-darkness of Xabi’s private room at the clinic. It smells artificially nice instead, of bland purified air. He can see well enough though that something else is missing from the picture.

“Where’s your hospital gown, mate?”

Xabi looks down at his sweats paired up with the latest Liverpool away kit shirt (the red would have clashed with the pants) and folds his laptop onto the nightstand.

“If you wanted to get a glimpse of my ass you should have come half an hour ago when they did the spinal puncture.”

“Missed it for the press conference, sorry. Did it hurt?” Stevie plops himself down in an armchair by the bed, his misgivings about the whole situation loosened yet further by how comfortable the seat turns out to be. He has to admit that the whole clinic seems like top class and the kind of place where it’s obvious the Swiss don’t fuck around, the lack of flimsy, open-at-the-back gown notwithstanding.

“No, but they have the good kind of drugs. After they reheated my blood and pumped it back in, everything feels… sort of nice and numb,” Xabi gesticulates vaguely. “How are the lads?”

“Buzzed and hopefully in bed by now. Jordi’s the most excited about going to Liège next, local derby for him.”

“Stevie… it’s almost 1am,” Xabi says.

“Yeah…”

“You don’t have to stay here. I mean… I’m glad you came, but… Even if anything went wrong at some point, they wouldn’t know it for a few days, maybe weeks.”

“Already told everyone I’m taking the later plane back. And I brought you something,” Stevie says, switching gears fast enough to ignore the part about things going wrong.

Fuck that part.

“Bedtime stories?” Xabi notices at last that he’s holding a small paperback.

“Since you wouldn’t let me read your… symbolic crime novel, I thought I’d go with the next best thing.”

Stevie makes a show of opening up _The Big Sleep_ and leafing through the preface, conversationally remarking on how Chandler was kind of a weirdo who had a bit of a problem with the ladies and Xabi can’t stop grinning because he knows there is no way Stevie’s picked the book by himself. He can vividly picture Stevie drinking in every word of a bookstore attendant with a ring in her nose and a clear opinion on what constitutes good crime fiction.

“Or at least according to Lilly-Ella,” Stevie finishes with a little shrug. He stretches his legs and digs into the first chapter, his forehead creasing at every piece of Americana or any word that’s been out of the vernacular since before the Blitz.

Xabi watches through half-lided eyes as Stevie’s facial expressions morph with every turn of the story, seemingly lost in noir era Los Angeles. He slides under the covers gradually…

…it’s summer. The air smells of grass.

“ _Steve_?.. You called me Steve in The Mirror?”

“What is wrong with Steve? I like it, sounds more… grownup,” Xabi’s teeth raking down his earlobe are quite a distraction from the newspaper Stevie’s struggling to read over both their heads.

 _Steve is everything…_ Stevie tries to imagine Xabi actually uttering those words out loud… _Gerrard is wanted by all… In the year I have been at Liverpool I have come to understand what is expected._ It makes the air in his lungs hotter.

Xabi’s body is pressed so close against his that he can feel the knot in Stevie’s stomach tighten.

“You shouldn’t have to even have to answer these questions, I’m…”

“Stop saying you’re sorry,” Xabi hums against Stevie’s lips. He snatches the newspaper from Stevie’s hand and throws it unceremoniously under the bed. “You’re here now, aren’t you? You’re staying.”

Stevie’s eyes are as vulnerable as he’s ever seen them.

“Yes,” he whispers.

Nothing Xabi says to him would make Stevie feel any less miserable. Some of the things Xabi does to him achieve the effect instantly though…

..at some point Xabi opens his eyes and realizes he’d dozed off to the sound of Philip Marlowe’s oddly fitting new Scouse accent.

_It was a hard bare masculine bedroom with a polished wood floor, a couple of small throw rugs in an Indian design, two straight chairs, a bureau in dark grained wood with a man's toilet set and two black candles in foot-high brass candlesticks…_

Xabi closes his eyes, pulls the covers tighter around his body.

_The room felt cold. I locked it up again, wiped the knob off with my handkerchief, and went back to the totem pole. I knelt down and squinted along the nap of the rug to the front door. I thought I could see two parallel grooves pointing that way, as though heels had dragged. Whoever had done it had meant business._

_Dead men are heavier than broken hearts…_


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lost in Scouse Translation, A Comedy of Errors Starring Didi and Carra really did happen and it's so epic, it deserves fanfic of its own. (Consider this a prompt.) The rest... not so much.

_December 2005_

Xabi feels jetlagged a week before they even get on the plane. Rafa’s got them on an insane training / sleeping / training schedule that’s supposed to gradually ease them into the Tokyo timezone, but all it seems to do to him is make him feel like he’s on a loop, like he’s on a one second lag from the rest of the world and his reactions to everything are just fractionally… off. He swallows sleeping pills like they’re tic tacs. It turns out that as fucked up as they are, their new sleeping patterns are still not enough to prepare them for the otherworldliness of Yokohama.

Xabi wishes he could get out to properly see the harbor, the Ōsanbashi Pier and the baseball stadium that he’d read about on the plane, but there’s no time for any of that beyond the perfunctory walk around downtown with the team. He stares down at Yokohama Harbor from his hotel window, the lights suspended under his feet.

“Not that far from home, yeah?”

The quiet Ferris wheel twinkling in the dark is the only glimpse of Albert Dock anywhere in sight, but of course Stevie would be thinking of home.

“I don’t understand how he can not go to the funeral,” Xabi leans his forehead against the cold glass pane.

“Makes sense for Rafa though, doesn’t it? Probably thought he can do more good here anyway.”

He’s watched Xabi watching Rafa since they got the news and knows Xabi’s thinking _what if it was my own father?_ because he’s asked himself the same question all afternoon. Stevie’s love for his father is not that easy to detach from his love of football and his love of Liverpool somehow blends seamlessly with his love for all the people who matter to him most. Well, not for _all_ the people who matter to him most. Stevie swallows that thought down tasting bile.

His fingertips ghost over the nape of Xabi’s neck and Xabi’s skin is cold under his touch. He’s not used to having Xabi be the one in a funk. He’s never anything but Mr. Positive, Mr. Everything Will Be All Right, You’ll See, So What If We Just Lost a Final, although Stevie can feel the jet lag fucking with all of their heads to an extent. Which probably explains what he asks next:

“Did you know they have cow tongue ice cream in Japan?”

Xabi tears his eyes away from the Ferris wheel and wrinkles his nose at him in disgust.

“’s right, I didn’t sleep the whole fucking eighty nine hours on the plane, did some reading of my own while you were canoodling with Pepe.”

“I was… noodleing?”

“Nevermind,” Stevie laughs and kisses him just because he feels like it, just because he smells of warm earth and freshly-cut grass.

“You have to go back to your room,” Xabi protests a bit later when his skin’s definitely not cold anymore, “before Carra will start shouting for you on the corridor.”

“Out with Didi, probably drowning their sorrows in a bottle of sake.”

Xabi’s attempts at shooing Stevie away would be far more convincing had his hand not sneaked under Stevie’s shirt and if only his thumb weren’t tracing half-moons on Stevie’s stomach, so Stevie ignores him.

_April 2018_

Nobody expects Liverpool to not win against Liège, not on their upswing in form at home, where they’re fifth in the league and breathing down Arsenal’s neck for the first time all season; not with Adam Morgan back from a hamstring injury; not with the traveling Kop singing the home crowd into submission all the way through. For once, Liverpool actually lives up to the all-consuming weight of its history. They qualify for a European semifinal without making it insanely difficult on themselves and with relatively little fuss as Morgan slots right back into a partnership with Jake that has sports writers finally starting to pay attention. They score four goals between them the day before Jake’s birthday and everyone gets drunk on glory and Belgian beer.

It’s a fantastic European night away from home, which is why the last thing Stevie expects to see at 3:30 AM is the inside of a Belgian police station. Xabi’d tried to fill him in on their long taxi ride from the hotel to the outskirts of Liège on how exactly Liverpool’s strike force ended up in a jail cell, but it had been mostly drowned out by his blood boiling in his ears.

“Well, if it isn't Adam Morgan and the bloody Half Blood Prince,” Stevie snarls once the unimpressed police officer on duty leads them to the holding cell currently housing two contrite looking football players, a spaced out, drunk young lady wearing only one shoe and napping on the bench across from them, and James Lee Duncan Carragher. "What a sight you lot make, I ought to take picture."

Jake and Adam spring to their feet off the bench and shuffle nervously towards the metal bars. The room reeks of alcohol, although their sleeping cell mate is the only one who hasn’t bothered with sobering up just because she’s in jail.

Stevie looks straight through them, the zoom of his ire pointed towards Carra, who’s still seated and looking at him with a blank, red-tinged face.

“Everybody in one piece?” Xabi asks, his voice low and soothing, which is worse, far worse than the daggers shooting out of Stevie’s eyes.

Morgan nods. Jake mumbles. Carra finally gets up.

“Good.”

“Good?... No, not fucking good! I get pulled out of bed at 3 AM with news of my strikers in jail because they got into a bar fight like a bunch of thugs… and then I find the _director_ of the Liverpool Academy, three hours before we’re supposed to be on a plane to London so he can catch a connection for the youth tournament in fucking Hong Kong, sitting next to them! How the fuck is that good?”

“Oy, settle down, Gerrard,” Carra mutters defiantly, “some arseholes picked on Jordi 'cos he’s Anderlecht, things got heated, we twatted them. Gave them a proper fight too, we’re supposed to teach these younguns strength of character, standing up for your mates and what yer believe in, aren’t we? Jordi ran out of there like a bellend, you were right to buy that little prick for his pace…,” he adds, a little disappointed, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“It’s my fault, boss,” Jake lifts up his eyes, hoping to smooth over whatever he thinks he understood from Carra’s rant. “It’s my birthday tomorrow… well… today and I dragged the lads into this…”

“It’s probably best to focus on getting you out of here first,” Xabi says and Stevie squints at him, unconvinced, because at this point he’d really rather let them sit there and have a think about what they’ve done for a night or three.

“If that was me in that cell, I'd never hear the end of it. You’d yell at me about PR fuckups and unprofessional behavior until you’d be blue in the face, but it’s Carra so it’s ha-ha funny?!?”

“Can’t help it, when Carra does it, it’s… colorful.” Xabi shrugs, trying hard not to reveal the extent to which he plans to take the piss out of Carra for the rest of his life basically. “Besides, I had a word with the officer, nobody got hurt and they were just being proactive, trying to avoid things blowing up. He wants your autograph though…,” Xabi lowers his voice to match the pointed look he’s giving Stevie. “Istanbul was the first football match he paid attention to as a kid… Already gave him mine.”

There’s a half smile on Xabi’s face, a slightly guilty smile of a naughty citizen charming his way out of a jaywalking fine, and a massive eye-roll on Carra’s.

“I was there that night too, y’know! Might remember me… big lad at the back, heroically holding off Shevchenko even though he was cramping in a world of pain?”

“Would have recognized you if you were Vladi Šmicer” Adam splutters out through a fake cough and he’s not ashamed to cower behind Jake, a pure self-preservation reflex.

“Or if you hadn’t been… and this is a direct quote… loud, belligerent and uncooperative,” Xabi adds, leading Stevie out to pay his dues to the officer.

“Welcome to my life, Belgian police,” Stevie sighs.

  
~

They’re out on the sidewalk waiting for an extra taxi twenty minutes later and it’s Adam who’s the first to point out the obvious.

“We’re not going to make it to the plane, are we?”

“Probably not,” Stevie answers, frowning at his phone. Xabi’s already on his, pacing the sidewalk a few feet behind them.

“Might have helped to think about that before we went all Fuck Da Police, I guess…” Jake stares at the night sky trying not to laugh, because it’s way too soon for this to be funny, then looks back to Stevie who’s still busy tapping on his virtual keyboard.

“What’re you doing?” Carra asks, a bit deflated now that he’s back to the banality of freedom, the high from fighting against wrongful imprisonment all but vanished.

“Texting Didi. He’s your sidekick, he’s gonna be gutted to be missing this... getting nicked in foreign countries is your bloody superpower,” Stevie barks back, but the bite is gone from his voice.

Xabi heads towards them, taking a deep breath before he lays out the plan:

“There are three morning flights from Brussels, but all are too late for your Hong Kong connection and because we have to pick up your passport from the hotel, we won’t make it on the plane with the rest of the team. However, Carla booked us on an earlier flight from Bruges, the rental car is waiting for us at the hotel already.”

“You woke up Carla?” Stevie asks.

Xabi lifts up his phone to illustrate his reply:

“It’s all over Twitter, the Daily Mail will have pictures as soon as it hits the stands in the morning so Carla’s working already on the PR response.”

“She was Xabi’s signing, loads of pace on her too,” Stevie cracks a smile at Carra, suddenly remembering that he’s the manager of a Liverpool team that’s qualified in European semifinals.

The second taxi pulls up at last and Adam hooks an arm around Jake’s neck, rapping his knuckles against his head as he shoves his younger teammate in the backseat.  

“Happy Birthday, numbnuts! We’re going on a little field trip, lucky bastard!”

_December 2005_

“Stevie..?”

“Mhmmm…”

Stevie’s staring at the ceiling with languid, sex-glazed eyes, quite content to not put together any actual syllables for the rest of the night. He just wants to trap this moment inside his brain for as long as he possibly can and just... lay in it.  

“Your phone,” Xabi curls his arm around Stevie’s sweat-soaked body and digs around under the pillow. “…is fucking annoying,” he breathes out once he fishes out the offending humming bird.

Stevie moans out in an entirely different register of frustration compared to the sounds he was making less than ten minutes earlier as he reluctantly takes his phone back from Xabi.

“Fucking hell!”

“What?”

“Didi’s taking the piss, surely. Says him and Carra got arrested for jumping on a taxi…”


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stevie really did want to kill Lee Bowyer. The rest is fiction.

  _April 2018_

They load their suitcases and their bleary-eyed strikers into the rental SUV and Xabi hands Carra a steaming cup of the blackest coffee he can find at that hour before he heads towards the driver’s side of the car.

“You sure you don’t want to sit with the lads, stretch your back?” Stevie cuts him off, zipping up his leather jacket against the chill of the impending dawn.

“It’s a two-hour drive…”

“Only if you put me gran behind the wheel.”

Xabi looks down at the cup of coffee warming up his fingers and has a change of heart.

“Try not to get us arrested again,” he chucks the keys to Stevie and walks across to the passenger’s seat instead. “Autographs will not be enough for repeat offenders, we would end up having to trade Carra for cigarettes.”

A middle finger sticks up in Xabi’s general direction before all doors are slammed shut.  

Jake and Adam are asleep as soon as Stevie takes the highway exit and Carra grunts at the sight of Morgan drooling over Jake’s shoulder.

“It’s the internet, I tell yeh. All that Facebook shite’s making them soft. Some of these U18 lads I’m taking to Hong Kong… Christ, they look like the closest they’ve been to a pair of tits was playing as Fat Frank on their fucking FIFA.”

“Makes you feel ancient, doesn’t it?” Xabi stretches his neck against the head rest, his eyes falling on the sparse traces of silver around Stevie’s temples. He realizes he looks about five years older than Stevie, although it may be because Stevie’s had forehead wrinkles before he could grow a beard and the human brain just can’t deal with Benjamin Button types and will make you see things that aren’t really there.

“Would explain the midlife crisis bar brawlin’,” Stevie gripes affectionately.

“Fuck off, you’re just jealous you’re an old, boring fart and missed out. I mean, what’s with the funeral music, like?” Carra protests as the low humming voice streaming from Xabi’s iPod into the audio system of the SUV drones something about leaning against walls and thinking of one’s dick.

Despite Carra’s grumblings, the baritone hum teams up with the prolonged spell of sleeplessness to lull him into a blackout doze.

~

“What, you’re too posh for EasyJet now?” Adam snorts at Jake in the middle of an improvised autograph session which is about to be cut short because it’s causing some serious disruption to check in queues.

“We smell like ass and probably look like ass too,” Jake screeches through his teeth as they’re both smiling beatifically in the middle of a group of Dutch children. “This is classic Alonso, he’s sending us to the naughty corner.”

The first thing Jake notices when their little troupe disembarks in the terminal of Ostend-Bruges is the BA flight announced with a departure of half an hour earlier than their own plane. Xabi informs them curtly that Carla thought it would be a good idea to have pictures of the two of them signing autographs on an EasyJet flight next to the ones of the two of them getting their asses kicked in a dodgy pub and they’re obviously in no position to question their Communications Director’s logic. Jake just seriously doubts this was not a collaborative idea.

They pluck up the courage to ask for breakfast once they pass through security, but Jake lets Adam wolf down his sandwich and quietly makes his way to the observation deck. He thinks, absurdly, that if this were an inspirational coming of age movie, there’d be discreet indie music strumming in the background and he’d lean against the glass watching planes take off to destinations unknown. Instead, the only vehicle he can make out on the runway at this hour is a fuel cistern and the only distinguishable soundtrack that breaks through the morning buzz of the airport is a repeated announcement for a Mrs. De Groof to please get the fuck through security already, in not so many words.

“Headache?”

Xabi extends a cup of Starbucks that promises to be bitter and scalding, two things Jake’s throbbing temples would actually gladly welcome were it not for pride fucking with him.

“What exactly is it that you _do_ around here?”

“I keep your boss’ blood pressure nice and low,” Xabi smirks ever so faintly.

Jake wraps his fingers around the coffee cup feeling instantly jolted back to reality.

“This isn’t… I don’t mean to…” Jake takes a deep breath, gathers his thoughts for a moment and starts again. “I wasn’t out celebrating last night. I’ve been... uh... trying to make a decision for a while and drowning in alcohol with a bunch of Scousers seemed like the smartest way to go about it at the time...”

“We’ve all been there at some point.”

“I’ve been getting these phone calls… my former agent wanted to chat since I started scoring goals, being in the papers...”

Xabi’s brow knits in anticipation, but he lets Jake sip a big gulp of predictably strong coffee before he’s ready to go on.

“Last night he finally made it clear that he wanted in on a piece of the action or else…”

“Did you talk to Struan?”

His silence is all the answer Xabi needs.

“You did well to come to me. We’ll take care of this together, Steven and Carla and I… we’re probably going to get the lawyers involved as well. By the time we’re through with him, that prick is going to learn all seventy six different legal definitions of blackmail by heart.”

Jake switches his weight from one foot to another and focuses his eyes somewhere beyond the deserted landing strips.

“Or I could sit down with one reporter who’s not a jackass and make it all go away a lot quicker. If only I weren’t too chicken shit…”

Xabi’s hand goes up to his shoulder and he lets it just sit there for a longer second while his eyes dart back to the table where he left Stevie and Carra bickering.

“I met someone,” Jake says softly, distracted by Xabi’s retreating hand. “He’s just a guy, nothing to do with football.”

“No gross legs?”

“I thought I wasn’t going to be a Hollywood cliché,” Jake licks his lips, the willingness to smile not quite reaching his cheeks. “Instead I’m asking him to share a lie with me and lots of take out on nights spent in watching Match of the Day.”

_You better hold on to that one then, anybody who sits through hours of Gary Lineker with you is a definite keeper._

“Anything you decide to do, we’ll be right behind you,” Xabi says out loud.

“When did you know that you had to choose? That there was no going back?”

Jake’s bright eyes pin Xabi in place and the denial never quite leaves his throat. He swallows it down and lowers his eyes looking for something to do with his hands.

"I've sat through enough of Lucas' Golden Era brainwashing DVDs to notice you still look at him the same way you used to when George Bush was President and you had roadkill on your head,” Jake looks away, a wave of guilt washing over the pain in his temples. He feels like an intruder, but somehow also like he owes Xabi some peace of mind. “Not to mention I've never seen anyone trying so hard _not_ to look that way at a guy."

"There was never... time to make any choices. I wasn't nine… twenty,” Xabi corrects himself with a thin smile. “I'd already made choices that I thought were the best for me... I guess we just met three years too late. Or three decades too early."

 

~

“You going to let that butty go dry?”

Carra watches Stevie watching Xabi shrug at Jake before the two turn around and move out of their view.

“Something the matter with Alonso?” his voice goes uncharacteristically quiet as he reaches across the table for Stevie’s uneaten breakfast sandwich.

“Huh?”

“He’s gone the color of boiled shite a bit lately and yer’v been tiptoeing around him like he’s with child.”

“Running one of the biggest football clubs in the world and goin’ round bailing Scousers out of jail at 3 AM at the same time can make a man tired, I suppose, but you can ask him yourself if you’re so concerned.”

Stevie buries half his face in his coffee mug.

Carra squints and thoroughly scans the mix of apprehension and… something else in Stevie’s eyes, knowing full well he hasn’t gotten any better at lying in the past two decades.

“Fuck me!” he half-whispers, half-whistles. “Ten years… a whole fuckin’ decade you’ve had to get smarter about Alonso and yer still as pure stupid about him as the day you tried to rip Bowyer’s face off for goin’ in a bit hard on his ankle!”

Stevie runs a hand over his tired face and sighs unconvincingly.

“Fuck off, you’re still drunk! You need more coffee, they may not let you on the plane to Hong Kong,” he says before he gets up from the table.

_December 2005_

Stevie gets back to his room just in time to open the door for a frenzied Jamie Carragher who drops theatrically onto the hotel bed still barely able to contain his adrenaline and sake fuelled giggles.

“What the hell have you gotten yourself into?”

“Fought de Bizzies and won, lad!” he stretches his arms wide with victorious rapture only to cross them back behind his head, grinning at the ceiling. “They caught Didi though, his pace really is shite. You should have seen his face! Fucking hell, what a story we’ll have for the grandkids while yer were moping about in a hotel. You’ve gone all soft arse from spending all yer time with all these continental ponces. Where the fuck were you, by the way?”

“It’s 2 AM, I was asleep, knobhead!”

“In the bathtub?”

Two sets of bleary eyes zoom in straight to Stevie’s perfectly undisturbed bed.

Oh.

They will not speak a word of it for the next decade, but there’s no need to. It’s just one of those things… Except it’s not, not for Stevie. The coil that will wind itself tighter and tighter around his gut for months to come springs to life that night, in an aseptic hotel room suspended above Yokohama Harbor.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They can stop anytime they want to, really.

_March 2006_

He leaves the pitch with Xabi’s arm around his back, the world suddenly, oddly weightless on his shoulders. Maybe it’s the cameras that follow Stevie around everywhere, even on the plane he boards for Paris the next morning, Gratty and the Champions League Cup in tow, or maybe it’s the numbing sense of might have been that would inevitably hit him later, but Stevie doesn’t feel nearly as gutted as he had dreaded and expected to feel.

_Big Ears says see u next yr. Think she misses me already._

Xabi doesn’t reply, but he’ll roll his eyes out at him late at night, in his apartment, when he asks Stevie if he plans to get a tattoo of _her_ profile on his behind, sailor-style. He gives Stevie's ass a hard squeeze to illustrate a point.

It bothers Stevie that he’s this OK with losing, even though he knows he can’t accuse himself of not caring because he does, he does, he does care so very much… The problem is he’s happy and the voice inside his head won’t shut up about how much he doesn’t deserve to be. And no, it’s not their utterly devoid of self-belief strikers or the man in charge who can’t seem to inspire them. It’s… something entirely different. It’s being happy because of football but without football at the same time. His fingers stop their idle ambling through Xabi’s hair and he looks at the top of Xabi’s head resting just under his ribs.

“What now?” Xabi protests against his skin, lazily crawling up Stevie’s chest.

“Nothing…”

"We lost and it sucks. And is all your fault, OK? Worst Captain ever,” Xabi chuckles, closes his eyes and his lips around Stevie’s Adam’s apple. “You can take out the boy from the Catholic School, but not take the Catholic guilt out of the boy…”

“Aren’t Spaniards supposed to be all Papists?... Technically?” Stevie asks, relishing the opportunity to sidetrack Xabi from reading his mind.

“I’m Basque,” Xabi turns on his back, the memory of his last proper Sunday mass in church coloring his sharp cheekbones a pale shade of pink.

Although Stevie had drunk-teased Xabi about his exchange student adventures on occasion, until he’d eventually fessed up to certain things he would never disclose in a sober state of mind, Stevie really had no business knowing how he’d spent every Sunday of one summer forever ago in an Irish church, pretending to sing from the hymnal while his eyes roamed all over the eldest of the O’Brien’s impossibly blue-eyed daughters.

_“You tried to shag your host sister???”_

_“I was_ in love _, cabrón! For your information… I did not_ try _… To want and to try are two very different things,” Xabi had philosophized meekly and gave Stevie a shove in the ribs, desperate to keep their fairly incoherent pub chat away from Pepe’s ears._

_He tried to mumble something else about how it would have never worked out because she went around humming Spice Girls songs off key and had Hanson posters up on her wall, not to mention the fact that he was far too shy to say more than three words in English for most of his stay there, but Stevie was way too drunk to care or remember by that point._

Now that he’s sober, Xabi congratulates himself on leaving out the more embarrassing parts about how he looked up words in the dictionary, trying to explain to his own senses how sweet she smelled, in her own language. Or about that day when she noticed he existed across from her at the dinner table and how she asked him to say something in Basque and smiled at finally hearing his voice at normal volume and for more than the briefest of seconds, even though she had no way of knowing what _Zure begiak ederrak dira_ …. _Ez dut utzi nahi_ … meant. He’d gotten a big smacker straight on the lips on his last Sunday in Ireland and left with a broken teenaged heart.

Xabi should know better the summer after that, when the new tennis coach arrives at the neighborhood club from a university across the border, all sinewy, muscly arms and legs, French cigarettes, killer one-handed backhands and stupid, post-punk graphic tees, but… he’s not old and wise enough just yet. He doesn’t get his heart broken quite in the same way, although he does get quite a bit more than a stolen kiss, but Xabi knows instinctively that he needs to look for shelter. Eventually, and not without a few storms weathered on the way, he finds it, his perfect safe harbor, until he ends up washed up on the wrong shore of the Irish Sea.

_September 2006_

“We’re getting married…”

“Congratulations.”

Stevie lifts his eyes, his heart dropping a few levels lower to meet his already nauseated stomach. He looks utterly, miserably lost and Xabi feels a daft little pang of sympathy on top of all the other things he’s feeling right now and which he’ll compartmentalize and rationalize later, much later.  

“What do you want me to say? Ask you to…” Xabi looks for the perfect word somewhere over the horizon, but fails to find it, the memory of some yellowed page of English prose too distant to be of any use, “…run away with me? Go to play for the San Jose Earthquakes and to retire in a beach home in California? ...Listen to you when you sing cheesy Phil Collins songs in the shower? ... Get a dog?”

Stevie winces out of reflex. _Cats. A couple of cats. Wouldn’t need no walking, shit in their own box…_

“Fuck this!” he spits out, shaking his head with the same hopelessness he sees in Xabi’s amber eyes. “Just… everything, y’know? I’m sorry… I…”

"I want you to be happy,” Xabi rescues Stevie from himself, his thick eyelashes half-lowered in tune with his voice.  He means every word and a few more that he never attaches to his bland pronouncement.

It’s not until later, during inevitable celebrations with the lads, when Kuyt pats him on the back, waggling his ugly-but-adorable dog eyebrows at him and slurring:  “So… Alonso… When is your bird going to make a decent man out of you?” that Xabi feels like he could happily wring Stevie’s neck.

They can stop anytime they want to, really. They do stop, several times, the months in between those times used as a respite, a lull in proceedings between the times when they barely look at each other and celebrate goals with a half-hearted pat on the head and the other times, the times when they leave purple bruises and finger marks on each other and disguise them as training accidents and blame Finnan.

They can stop anytime. By the following spring they both know it’s time to stop for the last time.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Does he count as a WAG?"

_May 2018_

“Get off of me, you bellend!”

Stevie can barely find the energy to shake Jake off his back after screaming himself hoarse for a hundred and twenty plus minutes, after wearing a groove into the dugout and digging purple crescents into his palms for the duration of his first European semifinal on the sidelines of Anfield. He observes he seemingly neverending scrape with a strange feeling of disembodiment, as if his legs were involved in every crunching tackle and his skin could feel every blade of grass. The only time he’s ever felt like this before, like he was watching his soul running frantically outside of his body, was watching his girls chase each other around his legs. Except tonight there were eleven versions of him out on the pitch and, shouting and flailing aside, there was nothing he could do but hope and ball his fists tighter.

Jake finally slides off of Stevie when they complete their return to the dressing room. His bones don't even register the effort of carrying his euphoric striker like a baby koala after he’d latched onto Stevie’s back with all four toned, brown limbs and led forty-four thousand souls into at least a dozen renditions of the Gerrard song.

“Boss, you’re what us New Yorkers call one hardass motherfucker!”

He’s never seen Jake like this (well, at least not when sober) the feline swagger and _fuck you, watch what I can do attitude_ replaced by the boundless and slightly misguided energy of a puppy you’re trying to keep from licking your face.

“A’right, a’right,” Stevie laughs, voice crackling with the same sheer fucking elation he sees on everyone’s faces. “All I did was play you at left back for half an hour when we were deep in shite and hope for the best. Whatever, it worked, but Christ you nearly gave me a heart attack one too many times, you bastards!”

After the jumping around amid assorted piles of trash scattered on the concrete floor and the badly synched chants of _“Finalists of the lesser of the European Cups, we know what we are!”_ die down a bit, Jake just stands there for a few moments, his back straight like a rod, the rush of adrenaline slowly retreating under the surface.

“I, uh… There’s something I wanna tell you guys…”

“Fuck me, you is gone back to United in this summer, right?”

Jake is taken aback for a second, his Scouse wit detector not quite fully functional yet, but once the laughter dies down, he sounds as calm and collected as one of his killer lobs over some of the league’s best goal keepers.

“Barcelona or bust, Joao, how many times do I have to tell you? Nah, I just… If we had any other job, if we were accountants or garbage collectors this would be none of your business, but… football hasn’t reached the level of public sanitation services yet so… This could affect the team…” Jake pauses for just long enough to look at Stevie across the room and the warmth in his eyes is like an anchor. “I don’t give a shit who you’re sleeping with and hopefully the same is true for you, but… I’m gay.”

There’s a soft current of air being whooshed out of several sets of tired lungs but not much else for a while, not until Adam’s eyebrows come down from the ceiling.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, Morgan, I’m pretty sure.”

“Well, is just… you dress like a chav!”

“So do you,” Jake points out.

“Exactly!”

“And yet I’ve always been into dudes. Sorry, this is fucked up… it’s not like you guys have to walk around explaining to anyone who you sleep with, but there’s people out there who’ve been trying to use who I sleep with against Liverpool and I didn’t want it to blow up in your faces.”

Unsurprisingly, Lucas is the first one to put an arm and his Captain’s armband around his neck.

“I don’t know how things worked at United, but around here nobody messes with one of ours. A’right?”

“OK. I just… This doesn’t have to change anything between us. I mean… You got nothing to worry about, I showered next to you guys for months without getting a boner, I think I can handle it from now on too.”

“Oy, so we’re not sexy enough for you now?”

“I’m not into football players,” Jake shrugs, the corners of his mouth going up with the predictability of Adam’s disappointment. “What can I say, Morgan, gross, ingrown footballer toe nails don’t drive me wild. If you saw your chavettes naked in the shower every single day, you’d probably be bored of finding the same thing at home after a while too.”

“I always thought I had a sexy bum though. Are you sure…? Never?”

“Nope. Sorry, Jordi. ”

“So… what is your type?” Joao asks as conspicuously as humanly possible.

“I… met someone. We’ve been going out for a while. Well, not out-out. But that would be nice. Normal. He’s been out his whole life, his family’s always been supportive of him. It’s been weird to force him into hiding because of a stupid job.”

“Your family’s supportive of you too,” Stevie says and Jake realizes he’s suddenly got a knot in his throat when he sees the feeling reflected on everyone’s still slightly dazed faces.</p>

“If it does go beyond this room at some point in the future, they’ll call all of you names too, not just me. At pretty much every stadium we’ll play at…”

“Fuck them. Let the whole world see them for the twats they are,” says their thickest, Most Likely to Have Grown Up at Stoke Academy defender. Jake is weirded out more by the fact that this is the first full sentence with a predicate he’s heard from him in five months rather than by his cool, reassuring shrug of indifference.

“You have our blessing, Guinto,” Lucas says. “But on one condition… Does he support Everton?”

“Believe it or not, he’s from Liverpool and doesn’t give a shit about football. His Mom asked for the boss’ autograph though. Not sure about his Dad… We’ve only known each other for three months, haven’t gotten that personal yet.”

Business as usual resumes pretty soon since there are elaborate plans to be made for the drinking binge to follow, even though the gratification has to be delayed until after their last push for the coveted and now painfully possible top four spot. Fuck up Chelsea first, drown in vodka later is the universally agreed upon battle tactic.

Stevie pats the back of Jake's head before he watches him getting ready to leave, surrounded by a larger than usual cohort.

“Is he cute?”

“In a nerdy way… He’s a biochemistry student.”

“So you pay for everything then.”

“Yeah, Joao, my life is a footballing cliché…”

“How the hell did you manage to pull a brainy guy like that?”

“No idea, mate.”

“Does he at least know the offside rule?”

“Does he count as a WAG?”

“Who’s usually on top?” … …. … “WHA’?!? You’ve all been thinking it!”

“He’s got a few single friends, Morgan; we can hook you up if you want to explore your curiosity.”

Stevie listens to the echo of their voices slowly fading down the halls of Anfield with a strange feeling of having forgotten something that’s right on the tip of his tongue.

Xabi doesn’t pick up the phone and the seventeenth rrrrring finally does Stevie’s head in.

“Where the fuck are you?”

 

_December 2008_

“I’m at Mikel’s.”

“Bolton Mikel?”

“Everton Mikel,” Xabi clarifies, knowing all too well that his brother is filed under the Good Mikel label in Stevie’s mental index while Arteta is Blueshite Mikel. “Jon has a cold, I am hiding from the germs while Everton plays out of town.”

This is a terrible idea and Xabi knows it, just like he knows he has no intention of ever stopping the words that come out of his mouth next.

“You want to have a beer or something?”

Stevie is at Blueshite Mikel’s door in eighteen minutes flat and for a while they pretend that this could work. That it’s normal, that they’re two mates chilling on someone else’s couch with a beer and the obligatory festive season football blathering on TV serving as the perfect placeholder for a conversation that consists almost entirely of grunts and half-mumbled bitching about United. It’s… nice.

Then Xabi says:

“I can’t get the kids at the hospital out of my mind.”

Stevie watches him picking at the corner of the label on his Carlsberg and keeps quiet because he doesn’t have to ask what’s changed after so many years of visiting sick children around Christmas. One of the many benefits of the squad’s yearly Santa trips to Alder Hey is to remind everyone just how blessed they are, how lucky they are to be alive, how lucky they are to have healthy sons and daughters.

“I know people ask you to go see their dying child so they can meet their hero before… I am maybe a horrible person, but I am glad not to be you in those moments.”

“You go all stiff and serious around healthy kids, nevermind sick ones,” Stevie smiles at him, oddly relieved to hear that someone other than himself does not want to be him. “They’ve got sharp senses them, can smell fear a mile away.”

Xabi’s knee nudges Stevie’s, slowly and like it’s the most natural thing in the world. He places the half-empty beer bottle on top of a French magazine Mikel keeps around for some reason and looks at Stevie for what feels and actually _is_ the first time in many moons.

“I missed you,” he says quietly, feeling the fault in the careful veneer of his self-control audibly crack wider.

Not many people would be able to tell because not many people know Xabi at all, but deep down he’s always craved the rush of a free fall. The taller the walls of self-reliance and wisdom beyond his years he builds around himself, the taller the springboard he can use. Some people see through it right away and those are the people he should steer well clear of, but…

“I didn’t mean it like that…”

“Bullshit.”

His hands are in Stevie’s hair so fast he doesn’t even remember how they got there and by the time he’s biting on Stevie’s lower lip and drowning in the sounds coming from the back of his throat, he could care less.

Xabi wakes up a few hours later to the sound of an atrocious version of Against All Odds coming from Mikel’s shower. He buries his head in the pillow wishing he could stop feeling like the most selfish creature to have crawled on the Earth.

 

_May 2018_

_What the fuck are yeh, some schoolgirl waiting for a phone call?_

Stevie gets a bit concerned when he realizes his inner monologue voice is beginning to sound a lot like Carra lives inside his head. He distracts himself from that pants-shittingly terrifying prospect with possible explanations for Xabi’s nonreaction to Liverpool’s biggest night in five years. Too busy scheming some backroom deals and planning an upcoming onslaught on the transfer market is a far more reassuring scenario than passed out drunk in some ditch. Steven chides himself for that thought.

_Fuck it._

His persistence is rewarded with a drowsy _Hola_ that doesn’t exactly bide well for his mental scenarios.

“Hola yourself, sleeping beauty. We had a meeting ‘bout half an hour ago.”

“Err… what?”

“Don’t worry, everyone was still too buzzed about last night to worry about doing their jobs today, you didn’t miss much.”

“Um… What day is it?”

Xabi sounds like he’s down in some stalagmite-covered cavern and Stevie’s beginning to lose it just a bit, but manages to keep a relatively even keel kind of tone nonetheless.

“The day after we qualified for a European final for the first time this decade, you divvy! Please tell me you at least watched it?!?”

Now that he thinks of it, Stevie doesn’t remember seeing Xabi anywhere around Anfield last night.

“Of course I watched it, don’t be daft, it was fantastic! I … stayed up too late.”

“You all right?”

“Fine… I’m fine. Sorry about the meeting,” he adds with a genuine note of regret.

“’S all right,” Stevie says, trying to get used to the very idea of Xabi oversleeping instead of undersleeping for once. 

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

Xabi looks down at where he’s laying on the sofa, wearing his rumpled trench coat but an otherwise undisturbed gray suit, complete with LFC insignia and a Liverpool scarf hanging half around his neck and half on the floor. It’s at least beginning to make sense for him.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the dumped-straight-from-the-draft unbetaed... situation. I'll get back to it after I get some fucking sleep.

_March 2009_

"Stevie… Are you all right?"

"No, I'm not bloody all right. You've been doing it on purpose," he hisses under his breath, eyes darting nervously to their elated team mates who are winding themselves down with victorious embraces and impossibly wide grins.

"Doing... what?"

"Looking at me like you want to eat me."

"But I _do_ want to eat you. In fact, I have every intention to swallow you whole as soon as we get back to the room."

Stevie’s blood drains from his face. They’re literally standing three feet from Iker Casillas, whose back he’d patted with equal parts sympathy and relief two seconds ago on their way back to the tunnel, and Xabi’s low-humming whisper spreads over the back of Stevie’s neck and down his spine like wildfire.

He can barely hear his own thoughts and his skin feels too tight for his body under the cascade of the shower and Xabi’s relentless mouth, but Stevie hears himself promising the ceiling and the football gods to score braces against Madrid until the end of time, absurdly wondering if all childhood Barcelona fans are this fired up after a Clásico.

In May, he’ll see Xabi wave to The Kop, his hand on his heart, and the part of Stevie that’s still eight years old and still begrudges every bruise and knock of Ironside will want to laugh in their faces with shameful but unavoidable glee. He’ll know they’re all still brimming with hope while he feels like Xabi’s been gone for a year already.

_April 2010_

“Hey…” Xabi beams at him, and it takes a while for Stevie’s mind to catch up with his eyes and connect Xabi’s dark navy cardigan and his very existence in a hotel lobby in Madrid with anything that feels a part of his reality.

He shakes Xabi’s extended hand with just the right amount of friendly but polite pressure and smiles discreetly at the sight of Xabi gesticulating whenever he trips over an English word he hasn’t used in a while.

Xabi only realizes the waiter’s standing behind him when he hears Stevie’s voice finally breaking through his torrent of eyewitness accounts of Atlético Madrid’s midfield prowess which has Pellegrino and Dave McDonough enthralled.

“He’ll have a coffee. Black, one sugar.”

He does his best to go back to illustrating the link-up between the colchonero players with the salt and pepper shakers he’d drafted as inanimate Assunçãos and Jurados moving under his deft fingers on the opaque panel of the restaurant table, but the tone of Stevie’s voice still rings in Xabi’s ears with the echo of his blood coursing ever faster through his veins.

The freckles on Xabi’s pale neck stand out sharper when his skin’s flushed and heated. Stevie tugs at his shirt with uncoordinated fingers and he can barely see anything, his hotel room flooded in daylight. On the other hand, Xabi’s body is so firm and real between his own hips and the door and his scent so intoxicating when Stevie buries his nose into the opening of his collar that sight is a sense he would happily dispose of right now.

It’s not like they plan…this. It’s not like either expected more than the occasional good luck text, maybe a phone call… Xabi hadn’t boarded a plane on his one weekend off expecting anything other than a suffocating Pepe hug followed by affectionate and occasionally lewd banter at Melwood. Somehow, once the English-sized pint haze cleared off, he’d managed to get all that and Stevie’s hand between his legs at more or less the same time, but it’s just a bonus, really. If that’s not the grownup way of saying _I forgive you_ or _I’ll forgive you eventually_ or _this is so fucking stupid and unfair, there’s nothing to forgive but I need to anyway_ , then what the hell is?

It’s not like they know they’re laying naked with Xabi’s leg swung around Stevie for the last time. Nobody plans for it to happen this way, it just does.

_“¡Puta madre!”_

Xabi claws at the back of Stevie’s head, breathing harshly against the corner of his mouth.

“Forgotten good, sound English cuss words already, have you?”

Xabi gives up on a lame attempt to shove Stevie in the ribs, his body sinking back into the twisting sheets, his eyes closed and his skin still rippling with aftershocks. After his breathing goes back to more sustainable levels, he slides a palm across Stevie’s side, as if remembering an earlier discovery.

“You are too skinny,” he says.

“Just rode 1,200 miles on a fucking bus across Europe and you’re complaining about what’s on the menu?” Stevie chuckles mirthlessly.

“I wish… It would be nice if we had time,” Xabi cuts himself off because he’s entertaining ridiculous thoughts and he knows it. “There is this place in Malasaña where they make the best paella in Spain. You need to be fed properly,” he tugs his arm behind the pillow to rest his head.

“Never really thought you’d really take a liking to a landlocked place, to be honest.”

“It has its charms…” Xabi opens his eyes. “I think you’d like it. And it will _love_ you.”

“Slow down, Mata Hari, what would Kaká say if he knew you’ve been trying to get into my pants to replace him, eh?”

Stevie’s smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He turns on his side and can see the scar above Xabi’s eye is almost faded, its contours hanging stubbornly onto a blade of bold sunshine.

“I’m sorry, you know how much Liverpool is…”

Well, fuck. His voice is not really supposed to hitch in his throat like this.

“You think I haven’t thought about it?” Stevie asks. “Just about every other fucking day lately. Thing is... other than maybe winning a league I didn’t grow up dreaming about… not much would change, would it?”

Xabi runs his thumb along and Stevie’s jaw, wishing he could prove him wrong and knowing he can’t.

“Besides… White washes me out,” Stevie says lamely, trying to convince himself he's not a coward.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What is this, some artsy, writer shite about… the meaningless of life and football?”

_May 2018_

“Did we just lose a European final, like…?”

Carra is a picture of crimson-faced bewilderment, feet firmly planted on the pitch of Westfalenstadion, where the confetti scattered around the center circle may be blue, but everything else is bright red, the stands are overwhelmingly red, the flags are red and the red sky _still_ vibrates with the loudest, if slightly German-accented, delivery of You’ll Never Walk Alone heard anywhere outside England.

“Yeah… I guess we did…,” Stevie croaks, his voice barely a scratchy rasp above the uproar of a stadium that knows it’s over but doesn’t care because it does not want it to be over. He grabs Carra’s sweaty head and plants a big, sloppy kiss on his forehead, laughing maniacally. “Cheer up, old man! 5-4, most beautiful football of the season, nobody’ll be talking about the Champions League tomorrow… One for the history books, eh?”

Carra blinks at him like you would at a very fragile, very unstable person whom you love dearly but know to be absolutely off their fucking rocker.

“Let them Italian twats have it! We’re still in Europe next year… Just have to slaughter Chelsea and Stoke over the next six days and Big Ears here we come!”

Unsurprisingly, Carra is a little slow out the gate when it comes to finding the hilarity that makes Stevie literally shake with laughter, his mind still reeling from the 123rd-minute, unstoppable wonder strike ( _From a fookin’ Right Back?!? Fookin’ Christ!_ ) that shattered Liverpool’s hopes of another penalty shootout final.

Stevie steps away and raises his gaze to the night sky, not caring a bit if it’s the release of pent-up adrenaline that makes him feel light enough to fucking fly. The singing still hasn’t stopped, it feels like it will never stop, and he misses his father terribly, ignoring the world around him for a brief spell because he wants to think of nobody else in that moment.

His eyes sting from the combined strain of exhaustion and the quick burst of photographers’ flashes discharging straight in his face and he lets them have it. It’s a consolation of sorts for those who’d missed a good angle on the earlier highlights of a 6’4” bald, tattooed Center Back cradled in Stevie’s arms as he soaked Stevie’s suit jacket clear through with tears. Or of Jake being warmly embraced and kissed by a family of pasty nerds, none moreso than the young gentleman who’d been almost pulled over the railing for an impromptu make-out session in front of the away fans. The likelihood of the Champions League being anywhere near the front page of any sports section of a newspaper or blog had indeed collapsed to zero.  

Stevie watches Jake pass him on their way to the bus, clutching his hard-earned Europa League final hat-trick ball.

“Next one I’m getting at Stamford Bridge, boss!” Jake yells over his shoulder, a second before Morgan jumps on his back.

“Fuck you, Guinto, you cheeky bastard,” Adam laughs. “Not in that way… You’re obviously taken. I’ll race you for the Bridge ball tho'…”

“Twat!”

“The kids are all right, I see.”

Stevie startles at the sound of Xabi’s voice close to his ear and for a split, irrational second he forgets that the last six months happened and wonders what he’s doing there.

“They know they were fantastic tonight, nobody could have asked more from any team.”

“Don’t know why we pay a sports psychologist when they have you,” the creases around Xabi’s eyes fold deeper with his smile and he forgets to tuck his right hand behind his back for long enough for Stevie to notice his bruised, bloody knuckles.

“The fuck…”

“I had a visitor at half-time,” Xabi shrugs, looking somewhere over Stevie’s shoulder for a more private corner. “Jake’s former agent wanted an urgent parking lot meeting…”

“McCreary?!? Who the fuck let him in?”

The explanation can wait for another time as far as Stevie is concerned, although he still catches the gist of it while he drags Xabi back to the now empty dressing room by the sleeve of his no longer impeccable shirt.

“He manages plenty of German players. But he was here to ask for a particular ex client back. I guess after the first two goals he figured there’s a lot more money to be made with Jake at Liverpool.”

“So you punched his lights out? You’d think a simple _No_ would…please tell me you did punch his lights out, yeah?” Stevie asks, voice full of hope.

Xabi looks at his bruised knuckles sheepishly.

“Let’s say his mouth looks a bit worse than my hand. He called Jake before the game, threatening to go to the papers again… If you thought the kid had mental strength before…”

Stevie smiles as he replays the final and the aftermath in his head, his hand loosening up his tie knot.

“I wish I’d been there to see what the prick had to say to get your fist through his grid.”

Xabi’s eyes suddenly wander around to a fixed spot on the floor, waiting for the resurgent wave of anger to slosh back under lock and key into his subconscious.

_Among other things, that he was not surprised that a little faggot would do so well under your wing, old rumors considered…_

“That… is not important right now. What he just told reporters outside the stadium was that he was planning to sue Liverpool Football Club because I caused him severe physical and emotional distress.”

“I fucking hope so!” Stevie laughs darkly, wondering if his night can possibly get any stranger. “Jake fucked up his little blackmail scheme, wait till we tell the press why that arsehole was following you around in parking lots to begin with. Soulless Agent Blackmails Young Footballer in Love,” he rattles off while searching frantically through a first aid kit laying about in a locker room.

Stevie settles for an ice-pack he wraps around Xabi’s swollen hand. He’s still holding it in place, his other hand brushing over the pulse point in Xabi’s wrist, when Xabi looks at him with strange, distant eyes.

“There’s something else McCreary does not know that it will not help his case…”

“You know what’s dead funny? Between you, me and Carra, yours is the best PR fuck up of the season,” Stevie speaks over Xabi, barely paying attention to anything but the numbing cold he feels in the fingertips of one hand and the burning current travelling through his other hand.

“He cannot sue the club. I am not an employee anymore, not since this morning.”

“By comparison, I’m a fucking angel, me…”

“I… have to leave for a while,” Xabi says, relieved to have finally caught his attention.

“Wha… McCreary doesn’t stand a fucking chance, the club will back you up 100 percent, Jake too, how can…”

“Stevie… I’m dying.”

Stevie’s hand tightens around the ice-pack for a second before he lets it drop into Xabi’s other palm. His breath doesn’t return to his lungs for a while.

 “What is this, some artsy, writer shite about… the meaningless of life and football?”

“No… Well, we’re all dying, I’m just apparently getting there a bit faster, that’s all.”

“All… That’s…” Stevie sputters over his own words. “Are you on drugs? I knew it! Please tell me you fell off the fucking wagon and hit your head hard on the way down!”

Suddenly, Xabi wishes he had reconsidered his utter disdain for self-help books because a How to Tell Your Loved Ones You’re Ready for the Glue Factory guide would come in handy right about now.

“Steven, no… I’m sorry, I don’t know how else… I could go into great detail about the growth patterns of the spinal tumor that’s most likely going to kill me… eventually… but it would not make much of a difference, no?”

After the week he’s had, Xabi can tell by now that it’s finally starting to sink in for Stevie and he’d give just about anything to skip this part, the part where he hurts someone he wants to protect and feels guilty about failing at it so badly. It’s Week 1 and he’s fucking tired of it already. Xabi places the ice-pack on a table and reaches out to caress Stevie’s cheek with his warm, bruised hand. Stevie recoils as if burned, he’s almost on the other side of the dressing room in less than a second.

 “Did those Swiss fuckers do this to you? You said… you said it could go wrong, the treatment… did it?”

“Whatever time I have left is actually thanks to them. Apparently my chronic back pain was… mal… misdiagnosed, they missed it during my back surgery. Until now…”

“How long?”

Xabi wishes Stevie weren’t this… subdued, he’s not quite sure he knows what to do with a composed Steven Gerrard at this point.

“Don’t know… It depends if it’s the kind that’s… that can be operated or not. The good news is it’s a type II, slower, less aggressive… The bad news is it’s had a lot of time to grow in peace. The Swiss fuckers booked me to the best tumor center in America, I’m starting treatment in North Carolina next week.”

Stevie runs his cold hand over his mouth, his stubbled skin forgetting to react to his icy fingers.

“Does… Jon know? Does anybody?”

“Mikel, my parents…I’m flying to Paris tomorrow,” Stevie feels a sharp pang of regret for even asking because this is the first time he can hear Xabi’s voice break.

“You have to fight it, you hear me?”

Stevie shuffles closer with hesitant, piecemeal strides, but his voice is steady and strong.

Xabi shrugs.

 “Well, they’ll start by zapping my brain with this cool experimental laser… Might get a superpower out of it.”

Stevie would like nothing more than to get a good, satisfying punch of his own, but he envelops Xabi in his arms instead, his fingers latching onto the back of his neck, just under his shirt collar.

 “You can’t die, you idiot. We’re playing Champions League next year… what the fuck are we going to do about Barca without you?”

“OK,” Xabi says, his eyelashes closing against Stevie’s neck.

“I need to read your fucking book, with the time travel and the killer… You’re _not_ going to die! You can’t!”

It’s the first time all week that Xabi’s terrified of dying, the first time he truly fears it all the way in his bones, but he decides not to argue with him.


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carova Beach is a real place with no roads.

_August 2018_  
  
It’s nowhere near as unbearably hot as Stevie expected going by the wave of humidity that had sucked the oxygen out of his lungs as soon as he’d set foot on the airport tarmac. Out here, he can smell the ocean, although it’s still out of sight, can feel its saltiness stick to the hairs on his forearm when his hand hangs over the open window of the off road vehicle.  
  
Stevie listens amiably to his driver’s slurred _s-_ es as they make their way through ash white sand dunes peppered with shrubbery and sporadic seagulls drifting too far from the shore. His name’s Emiliano, he’s originally from Louisiana and he laughs heartily every time Stevie asks a question about the region, his massive, tan beer belly straining against his seat belt through his half-open shirt.  
  
Emiliano predictably cracks up at Stevie’s Scouse _gracias_ when they shake hands and Stevie sets off for the dark blue streak of the Atlantic across the beach, adjusting his light backpack that screams tourist. His eyes strain even behind his sun glasses, but he takes in his surroundings with a fair amount of confidence that he knows what he’s doing and where he’s going.  
  
" _Kaixo_ ,"he says after his first three steps onto the dry planks of the small fishing dock.  
  
He can’t tell if Xabi’s blinking at him in astonishment, he can barely tell if that’s Xabi sitting on the dock at all in fact, between the goggle-sized shades and the massive, floppy fishing hat.  
  
“Esteban,” Xabi breathes out at long last, sounding anything but surprised. His chin drops to his chest and Stevie can finally see enough of his face to be able to tell he’s giggling, sliding the tip of his tongue between his teeth.  
  
“Mikel said to take full responsibility,” Stevie shrugs and sets down his backpack before he gingerly leans to sit on the dock next to Xabi. “So, try not to hurt him too bad for giving away your secret lair.”  
  
He settles in stiffly, keeping every inch of his body pulled in tight as to not accidentally brush against Xabi.  
  
“I can sympathize; I know how annoying you can be when you don’t get your way.”  
  
Xabi smiles and now that he’s closer Stevie can tell that he’s slender and pale as ever, but nowhere near the consumptive, frail shadow of his former self Stevie had imagined in some of his more anxiety-ridden nights of the last three months. His copper beard is thick and slick and not even coming off in tufts like Stevie’d imagined on one particularly embarrassing drunken night in some hotel in a far flung corner of Europe. Xabi looks toned and healthy and relaxed in his green shorts and his frayed but undoubtedly vintage graphic t-shirt. His bare feet are dangling high over the small waves lapping at the pillars that hold them over the ocean and he continues to maneuver the fishing tackle between his fingers as Stevie confesses, somewhat defensively:  
  
“I considered using Lilly-Ella to collect intelligence after she told us she… trolls you on last.fm,” he mumbles, still unsure of the verb he’s just used, “but well… I’m not that kind of parent.”  
  
“In other words, she told you to fuck off.”  
  
“Gets her feist from her mother, that one. But then Mikel came to see us dismantle Bilbao in the Champions qualifier, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try my luck.”  
  
“You didn’t dismantle Bilbao, they imploded like you knew they would under pressure. Not that I enjoyed it any less,” Xabi clarifies, casting the rod into the shimmering water again.  
  
“They let you stay up to watch footie?”  
  
“I downloaded the game. I haven’t slept less than 10 hours a night since the surgery; down from 16 hours in the first few days.”  
  
“Suits you. You look… real good.”  
  
“Are you here to recruit me while the transfer window’s still open?”  
  
“You’ll be back when you feel like it. If you want to. “Stevie’s forehead creases and Xabi knows he’s worrying, trying to think of the right thing to say. “Never really agreed with Shanks, to be honest, there’s life and there’s football and football’s not what matters most… If I were you, I’d probably just put my feet up on that beautiful beach in San Sebastian and not want to work another day in my life. Nobody _expects_ you… that’s not why... I just… wanted to see you.”  
  
“I’m glad you came.”  
  
Xabi can hear Stevie exhale slowly and wants to tell him he knows too well that Stevie’s not fond of leaving home or flying, or heights such as the one they’re currently at for that matter, and that he’s missed him more than he’s missed decent paella, but he’s had too much time to think of it all for a whole summer and he lets the words on the tip of his tongue fall to the ground unspoken.  
  
“So… what’s for dinner?”  
  
“You eat what you catch.”  
  
Xabi proudly presents him with the lone, four-inch Black Drum swimming in circles in the plastic bucket by his side and Stevie looks pained rather than impressed.  
  
“You’re actually going to take a knife to this little thing?”  
  
“Big and fucking hard, my arse,” Xabi chuckles and flings the slimy, agitated creature back into the ocean by its tail.  
  
They settle for eating other people’s catch instead and head on foot for what Xabi claims is the only restaurant worthy of the name on the whole string of islands, after he dumps his fishing gear in a crusty rowboat moored to the foot of the dock. Stevie’s stomach’s still in Europe and his head still feels woozy from the constant thrum of the various engines that brought him here, so he doesn’t mind how distant the silhouettes of the seaside shacks passing for a resort seem to be.  
  
Xabi walks barefoot in the surf, smiles when he realizes Stevie would still not take his flip flops off on the beach, even though his legs have long stopped carrying a multimillion pound insurance policy, and he’s savoring the taste of each word of their conversation along with the salty early evening air. They talk about everything, all the things they could never quite remember to say to each other during their weekly I’m Alive phone call, everything but football and tumors.  
  
“Can’t really blame you for wanting to keep this place a secret, mate. My driver showed me the wild horses on the way here… Wait till Lexie sees the pictures I took, she won’t shut up about coming to feed them carrots till I give in. “  
  
“They were a hit with Jon too… he came for a few days before school started… Had to learn the hard way the definition of wild, he kept insisting he would like to ride one,” Xabi reminisces, doubling down to pick up a shiny, flat stone washed in on a crest of foam.  
  
He sends it skipping across the incoming wave five, six, seven, eight times with a quick flick of his wrist.  
  
“They’re Spanish horses, you know.  Their great-great-grandparents shipwrecked here when the conquistadors sank off this coast.”  
  
“That’s… so bloody you,” Stevie shakes his head, his eyes watery and beautifully wide in the retreating light.  
  
Their barbequed fish dinner at a tiny joint filled with coarse-skinned fishermen is a lazy, enjoyable prolongation of their walk. Stevie recaps the latest adventures of everyone at Melwood, Didi and Carra’s legendary boozy dinners at Carra’s restaurant; Xabi tells him about his Arsenal-loving physical therapist, about how he’s exercised more intensely over the summer than in most of his time as a professional athlete; about Jon’s visit and how much he loved fishing up and down the coast…  
  
“We… had a great time,” Xabi murmurs, a bit surprised, like it’s finally sinking in after the fact. “My 91-year-old grandfather is challenging us to fishing baby squid from a Txipironera, like real men.”  
  
...and they both have tears in their eyes as they recall that one time when Pepe replaced Jermaine Pennant’s porn with Lampard’s sex tape on an away trip.  
  
They slowly sip their surprisingly good, fresh, green wine and Stevie can’t help but make a face when Xabi orders their second bottle.  
  
“It’s unlikely I’ll die of liver disease,” he answers the unspoken question, regretting the sudden intrusion of present reality into their evening. “Mikel probably has told you… My final scan is next Thursday. If… if they still can’t see anything, I’ll be officially discharged.”  
  
Xabi’s fingers fiddle with the stem of his wine glass and his unsure smile makes Stevie’s heart unfairly seize with anticipation.  
  
“I knew you’d… I…” Stevie starts and stops. His gaze falters over Xabi, the warm amber of his eyes making him stupidly flustered. “Been doing some reading ever since… since you came here. I know the odds.”  
  
“Then you know that the pain being mostly gone and a clear scan don’t mean anything for the next five, ten years. Not even for a year sometimes… And I can’t think of anything further than that.”  
  
“You’re ahead of the curve already. Maybe not like those guys that run marathons six weeks after surgery, but… even twenty years…,” Stevie hisses, verging on irrationally angry. “We had lower odds at half time. In Istanbul… Dead serious, I looked it up,” he insists.  
  
Xabi looks behind him at the dark purple and orange sky and Stevie deflates instantly when he realizes he has no right to spring his dumb but insistent hope on a man who’s had plenty of time to contemplate his mortality for quite a while.  
  
“I’m sorry… I’m a real beaut, listen to me…”  
  
Xabi’s hand catches his and he gathers his fingers off the tablecloth in a tight squeeze before Stevie even has the time to panic and instinctively search the eyes of the people around them. It takes a moment for him to register that in this time zone nobody’s looking at them nor gives a shit and by then Xabi’s hand slides back to his wine glass, fingers elegantly spread flat around its base.   
  
“Steven… There have been some nights since the surgery when I’ve had to remind myself why… what I was even doing here. First, I want to see Jon go to University,” Xabi’s voice sounds so resolute, it’s enough to instantly detangle the knot in Stevie’s gut. “Also, it would be nice if I learned how to play golf. Properly this time,” the corner of his mouth curls wickedly and they both know exactly who’s to blame for the utter failure of past lessons in pre-season training camps.  
  
“Also… I would like to see you lift the Champions League trophy again.”  
  
Stevie lets out a big half-snort, half-chuckle, a little unnerved by how much he wants the same fucking thing.  
  
“No pressure, eh?”  
  
  
The cold sand numbs the soles of Xabi’s feet on their way back and by the time they stand on the porch of the beach house across the dock, the sky is inky black and dead quiet.  
  
“When is your flight back?” he asks, voice low and shoulders slumped casually.  
  
“Tomorrow afternoon. I have to call the driver to take me back to civilization, I have a room in Norfolk.”  
  
“Good,” Xabi whispers.  
  
He knows what he’s about to do has the potential to rank among his Top 3 Most Selfish Moves, on a list on which popping Klonopin like candy next door from his sleeping child does not even make the cut. And yet, when Xabi brings his hand to the back of Stevie’s neck and pulls him forward, kissing him with every ounce of determination he has, he knows it’s a risk he’ll gladly take. Stevie’s entire being stiffens in shock at first, but Xabi doesn’t give way until Stevie opens his mouth and lets his tongue dip inside. From then on, Stevie’s whole body leans into his touch and he wonders briefly if he has any sense of self-preservation before he figures that with this particular man, he’s never had any to begin with.  
  
Once they’re on the other side of the door, they clutch clumsily at each other’s waistlines with unsteady hands.  
  
“Glad you kept these… Sabrina,” Stevie breathes out against Xabi’s mouth, the flat of his palms sliding under his shirt down to his love handles. “I like you with a bit more meat on your bones.”  
  
“You’ve always been a superficial bastard.” Xabi parts Stevie's legs roughly with his knee, applying just the right amount of pressure to exact his revenge. “How much time did you spend with my brother, exactly?”  
  
Stevie has no clever retort because once Xabi lets his t-shirt waft to the floor, his hands take over from his brain and sweet fucking Christ he’s missed all this skin, all of it, more than it’s probably healthy to admit and there is no way this is going to last nearly long enough once they stumble to the bed.  
  
Xabi inhales sharply when he feels Stevie’s hands on him, every part of him remembering the exact weight of each touch with a sense of desperation still wired through his body, wound tightly and ready to spring. Stevie’s mouth is slack and open against his, his movements sure and thorough, but Xabi can tell some part of him still holds back, still thinks of him as a fragile, dying man. Luckily, he knows exactly how to knock stupid ideas out of Stevie’s head, so he scrapes his fingers against the back of Stevie’s skull and drags his mouth from his jaw, down his neck and further down from his collarbone, wet and hot and eager. It pleases him to see just how well he still knows Stevie because one look at his face is enough to make sure he’s not going to be doing any thinking for a while.  
  
Plenty of things have changed, but not this.  
  
Stevie wakes up cold, his once fevered skin now dried and chilled by the early morning breeze creeping through a parted window. He walks around Xabi’s bedroom completely naked for as long as it takes him to retrace the slim trail of scattered clothing to the living room door. He finds his trousers and shirt neatly folded on top of a couch pillow and takes in the mountains of books and gym equipment surrounding him while he puts his clothes back on. He can finally wave away the slight feeling of dread lurching through his veins when he passes through the kitchen and feels the warmth of a half-drunk cup of tea seep through his palm. It smells bitter and oriental and Stevie’s surprised to think of Xabi as going for anything as nonscientific and non-peer reviewed as homeopathic remedies, but what does he know.  
  
The house is so still that all Stevie can hear is his breath rushing through his nose and it unnerves him enough to make him brave the crack of dawn morning chill on the porch. He can see the shape of Xabi’s shoulders among distant waves and the top of his head as he comes up for air. He can finally feel his pulse swirl back to its normal flow and can brush off the constant need to pinch himself. Xabi takes his time emerging from the waves and his lips are salty and cold when Stevie gets his hands back on him.  
  
  
“I think I found an ending to my novel,” Xabi hums against Stevie’s collarbone and runs his fingers through Stevie’s bed-mussed hair as they lay tangled in the drafty bedroom.  
  
“Is it a happy ending?” Stevie asks, warmth battling dismay in the pit of his stomach.  
  
“It’s an honest ending.”  
  
  
They walk in silence to Emiliano’s pick up point shortly before noon when they hear a loud _plonk_ followed by a spray of wet sand splattered across their pant legs.  
  
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Xabi laughs incredulously as Stevie picks up the football from the waves.  
  
They can barely make out the shape of a little girl no older than nine, maybe ten, hiding under a curly mop of hair, quite a few yards in the distance and Xabi waves back, duly impressed. He can tell from the set of Stevie’s shoulders and the small, pointed steps he takes back that the shot is going to curl long, sweet but powerful, straight to the ball owner’s feet and when it does… The glee in Stevie’s eyes makes him feel cold English wind sweeping across his neck, blades of December gales curling around the gasping communal breath of Anfield and for an instant Xabi hears the boom of energy released from forty-four thousand rib cages, perhaps his most poignant memory of the moment that changed both their lives and his forever.  
  
 _What a hit…_  
  
“Nice cross, mister,” the tiny voice reaches across the dune before she gets distracted by chasing a younger sibling back to their beach house.  
  
“He used to be not too bad at it either,” Stevie points to Xabi and after a brief moment of deliberation, the chase is paused for just long enough to send the ball rolling quietly on the sand back towards them.  
  
By the time Emiliano pulls over the dune, he finds Stevie chasing Xabi across the beach and although his legs are rusty, Xabi still denies him possession calmly, his eyes never leaving the ball. Eventually, the tackles fly in hard and they're cussing at each other in that funny language that's not quite English, between bursts of laughter.  
  
" _Joder_ , you're such a diver, Gerrard!"  
  
“Form is temporary… you know the rest,” Stevie says, mouth pressed against Xabi’s ear before he climbs back into the pickup truck.


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An Epilogue.

_May 26 th 2005_

This is the drunkest Xabi has been in all his life. He’s so drunk that he’s pretty sure he’s passed over some threshold of consciousness and landed on the other side where his body may be weighed down by the literal gallons of champagne poured on top of adrenaline, but his mind is scarily lucid and aware of every sensation. He decides this is what it must feel like to experience Martian gravity because that’s just the type of brilliance your under the influence brain will come up with at 3 am as you stumble on hotel corridors looking for the right door.

He doesn’t make it very far past the door frame once he finds it. Xabi’s back is immediately pressed against it and, luckily, Stevie’s just as drunk as he is so nobody minds how awful they must both smell in Sober World because Sober World seems like a galaxy in another universe right now.

"I... have to go," Xabi whispers between kisses, trying to remember why he’d come back to their room in the first place. There is some vague idea of payback for something in his mind, but it never quite settles inside a defined contour so he just keeps licking the spot behind Stevie’s ear which he knows is bound to make Stevie grind even harder into him.  

"You should, yeah..."

Xabi makes no convincing move out of their current position, takes advantage of Stevie’s head lolling to the side to scan the room when a flash of silver catches his eye on Stevie’s bed.

"Were you... cuddling it?"

"Jealous?"

There’s a definitive realization in Xabi’s mind that this night is going to be the topic of hundreds of interviews and conversations for as long as they’ll both be alive and able to form sentences, but he doesn’t tell that to Stevie when he backs him towards the bed and Stevie just flings The Champions League trophy aside with a flick of his wrist. It lands on the floor with a metallic whine and flops from side to side a few times before it settles on the carpet, belly-up.

Xabi is on his way out as soon as Stevie’s asleep, which is fairly soon given his state of intoxication and fucked out of his mind bliss, but he stops in front of the door, smiling at the drunk melodies still echoing in the distance, somewhere beyond the hotel windows. He tracks back to the bed, picks up Big Ears and settles it on Stevie’s nightstand with a sigh of relief at its lack of dents or any apparent scratches.

Stevie snores softly into the pillow, only half of his scrunched up face somewhat visible in the darkness of the room. Xabi runs his fingers through his sandy mop of hair, from his temple to the top of his head and leaves quietly.

Stevie’s first thought of the first day of the rest of his life as Champion of Europe is:

“Aspirin. Fucking Aspirin. Now!”

It takes him almost a quarter of an hour to manage to lift his head, but his lead limbs are completely uncooperative so he just flops back into the pillow. He cracks an eye open and sees a piece of red confetti stuck to the hairs on his forearms and then Stevie knows it’s real. All of it. At least the parts he can remember, which are patchy to say the least. His body is finally jerked into movement by panic and he manages to roll over enough to see Big Ears resting with quiet, metallic dignity on his nightstand. Stevie can finally push aside disturbing thoughts of the dream he’d had in which he’d pushed it off the bed and carelessly flung it onto the floor to make room for Xabi in his bed. The other parts of the dream, the ones where he does to Xabi what he normally does in Xabi Dreams are far less disturbing and will be put to improper use in the future, but this he couldn’t live with, mostly because Xabi would probably never let him forget.

There’s a sharp sting below his hip when Stevie completes the undignified roll back on his belly and when he lowers the sheet to check, he’s hit with a double realization: first, he’s no longer wearing his boxers; second, there are burning red teeth marks on the thin skin where his leg meets his torso.


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The End

_April 2019_

 

“Enzo or Boucheron?”

 “The long ones,” Stevie bluffs, feeling reasonably confident that Alex has long ago made up her mind about which earrings go with the LBD selected for the evening more than a fortnight ago.

Alex seems to be weighing his answer in front of the gigantic living room mirror before the verdict validates Stevie’s suspicions.

“I love you, pet, but you should try to hold on to your day job best you can,” she sing songs affectionately, dropping the Boucherons back into their minuscule velvet box. “Lilly, would you get the door, love?”

“You already know who it is, he practically lives here,” comes the predictably terse reply, although Lilly-Ella does drag her shredded denim and black tights-clad legs across the sprawling hallway.

“Oh, look. It’s Uncle Chubby!”

She resists the urge to roll her eyes out because she isn’t a teenage cliché, dammit, grungy jeans and hand-painted black tee notwithstanding.

“ _¡Hola, cariño!_ ” Xabi smiles his most devastating PR smile as he slides past Lily-Ella in an understated breeze of vetiver. The tailored suit and shiny dress shoes are predictably spotless. “I have something for you, wipe that Gerrard pout off your face,” he says casually and hands her a black square. Lily-Ella immediately recognizes it as a vinyl with her name scrawled on it in barely legible handwriting, next to some platitude about how music makes your heart soar or some shit.

“Fuck you!” she spits out, but the corners of her mouth betray her. “I still hate you, just so you know.”

“You wouldn’t let The Black Keys get between us, surely? Not when Stacked Actors happen to be back in town in two weeks… this time not on a school night,” Xabi smirks conspiratorially, strolling into the living room to kiss Alex on the cheek.

“You know he’s not allowed to illegally sneak you into dive shitholes with lax underage drinking policies. Not on a week night,” Lily’s mother reminds her. “She’ll get over it, what you have is special,” she winks at Xabi and Stevie pounces on cue.

“Remember when you used to cling to Xabi’s leg every time he came over? Like a little monkey? You told everyone at school you were going to marry him when you grew up,” he says earnestly, because tormenting your moody teen is just more fun that way.

“I think there was a castle involved, no?” Xabi reminisces as he makes a beeline for Stevie, who’s on the verge of losing his battle with his right-hand cufflink. “We were going to get married and live in a castle in Spain, remember?” he says while expertly clasping Stevie’s cufflink.

Lily-Ella loses her resolve to play it cool, but still says as nonchalantly as possible:

“Remember when you were fat? Oh, yeah… that was last year.”

Xabi sees Stevie trying not to crack up, ignores him and his spawn, takes two steps back and gives him a critical once over.

“You are not wearing that shirt with this suit.”

The pronouncement sounds pretty final to Stevie already.

“Told you,” Alex mutters and shoves half a closet’s worth of unused shirts hanging over the sofa in Xabi’s arms.

“I said: Xabi won’t let you represent the club at an official function looking like an accountant, did I not?”

“Oy, what’s wrong with this shirt?” Stevie asks in a last-ditch attempt kind of tone, but Alex’s hands are already at work undoing his tie knot.

“Everything,” Xabi frowns, going through various pastel versions of the same blue shirt until he stops at the last one on the pile. “I have already spent three hours with Adidas designers today, my eyeballs are tired from looking at ugly, mismatched shirts already.”

Steven laughs despite himself because he can see the scene so vividly in his mind, he can practically feel the football kit designers cowering under Xabi’s stare. He imagines Xabi keeps a massive REJECTED stamp dripping with red ink somewhere in his desk at Melwood which he’s now slamming straight over his shirt choice.

“There. Put this on.”

“You’re so whipped,” Lily-Ella giggles, clutching her vinyl to her chest and doing her best to ignore her father’s glare.

 

“I look like a proper ponce,” he says later in the car as Alex puts the finishing touches on her makeup.

“You’ll be fine, stop fidgeting,” she smiles into her compact. “Didn’t you practice your speech with Xabi?”

Stevie makes a face.

“Yeah, he said to start with a joke. Very helpful, tha’. He knows I fucking hate speaking at these fucking posh events, goes and organizes the Liverpool Awards or what have you… Like a fancy dress party is what we need to end the season. Not even his job, what the hell’s a gala got to do with football strategy and signing new players anyway, we already pay a bunch of jackasses for PR stuff.”

Alex knows there’s zero real annoyance behind his whinging and lets him to his mumbling knowing he’ll eventually get the better of his stage freight. She takes his hand in front of the photographers and smiles glowingly before she steps back when the reporters corral Stevie and Xabi, Mr. and Mr. Liverpool headlines guaranteed in tomorrow’s papers because they’re an original lot. Alex beams with pride watching Stevie’s nerves evaporate the moment he steps into manager mode.

 

When he later takes to the speaker’s dais to rapturous applause, Stevie’s eyes dart to their table and she has no doubt about where they’re anchored, doesn’t even have to look to see Xabi’s lips curl almost indiscernibly.

“Been getting a lot of the same question already, so let me get this out of the way first. Yes, Xabi Alonso did dress me tonight. Says real men wear pink.”

Stevie allows for some time for the merriment at his own expense to die down in the room and continues in an increasingly assured tone of voice.

“Probably gonna murder me in cold blood for telling you this, but… Xabi’s a man of many talents. He not only organized this fine gathering, picked the best wines to go with tonight’s entrees, is able to dress himself and runs one of the biggest football clubs in the world, but he’s also quite a gifted story-teller. He was kind enough to translate for me a few chapters of a crime novel he wrote and well… you lot are going to have to go out and pay for it, but…”

There’s laughter threaded with disbelief going around the tables and Stevie thinks some of the mumbling that barely makes its way all the way up to the dais is Carra grumbling about how having to put up with Stevie on a daily basis would drive anyone to murder.

“I’m just a guy from Huyton, no literary critic, me… so I just wanted to take this opportunity to tell Xabi that his story reminded me quite a bit of Liverpool. I know for a fact that everyone at the club wants… hopes that Xabi’s story with Liverpool has many, many chapters still left to unfold because he’s where he belongs. We all know how much he loves the club and we’re all better for it and myself… well… I can’t even argue with the London papers, I’d be lost every single day without Xabi’s drive and determination to keep it all together and make sure we slaughter London clubs on a regular basis.”

The room is so quiet, it would normally be intimidating to realize how much attention they’re paying to his every word, but Stevie doesn’t remember they exist anyway. He sees Xabi across the room, looks for any sign that he gets it and when he knows without shadow of a doubt that he does, that he knows it all and won’t let any mathematics or statistics get in the way, Stevie adds:

“Here at Liverpool, we’ve been written off many times, us, but we always find a way back. So Xabi, thank you for both stories... They’re both far from over. The future is unwritten.”

 

The End

**Author's Note:**

> Once this stops being a WIP, I will edit the beejeezus out of it, I promise, I just don't have time right now. Apologies for any major screwups and feel free to point them out.


End file.
